


i'm a live wire

by themountainkingsreturn



Category: Marvel (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: AKA HOW TO YOU MAKE FRIENDS WITH A SUPER SOLDIER WHEN YOU'VE ALREADY USED THE MARVIN GAYE TRICK, Help I've Fallen And I can't Get Up, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, SOLDIERS IN LOVE, THE WINTER SOLDIER: AN UNEXPECTED SHIP, i guess, mixtapes
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-04-09
Updated: 2016-07-02
Packaged: 2018-01-18 17:26:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 29,638
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1436653
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/themountainkingsreturn/pseuds/themountainkingsreturn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Something was different now. Sam thought a light had been switched on in the last few weeks, perhaps before he even consciously knew it, perhaps even from the moment he first saw Bucky in his group meeting. Because he couldn’t understand Bucky as a concept, not really. That deep, deep need for the wholeness of Bucky was something that only Steve possessed. It wasn’t Sam’s place to understand that.</p><p>But Sam did understand something about soldiers. He knew about them. And looking at Bucky now, with his lank hair bunched up against the couch and his eyes fixed on Cinderella scrubbing floors, Sam thought he finally did understand something.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. one

**Author's Note:**

> This is tagged with mixtapes. That is because this fic will eventually involve a mixtape. I just didn't expect it to get to nearly 6K without their appearance. Rest assured, however, that they are coming. Title taken from AC/DC. Preview of coming attractions.

The first time Bucky showed up at a group meeting, Sam did a double-take. Like, a real one, an honest-to-god Bud Abbott & Lou Costello cadence of glance, look away, beat, slow head turn, _holy mother of god slap me twice and fuck me sideways._ Nobody else noticed. Why should they? The Winter Soldier wasn’t exactly under the same public scrutiny as Captain America. The best they knew about him was that he had a metal arm and greasy rock star hair. And nobody was going to recognize the black-and-white Smithsonian photo of James Buchanan Barnes in this pale, hoodie-covered wreck. Bucky was wearing a glove and the hat he hid himself under when someone suggested he try going outside. And it was the hat, more than anything — that hat and the distinctive square slump of his shoulders — that made Sam do the slow head turn. Then he registered the face under the hat, and the shaded eyes that said something he couldn’t quite read, and he looked away.

The meeting proceeded as usual.

When it was over, Bucky didn’t wait up. He just hightailed it out of there, weaving between the clusters of people shaking hands and hugging and chatting. He didn’t even acknowledge Sam. Which was weird (though perhaps not out of character), Sam thought, because they were basically living together - or, more specifically, sleeping and eating in near proximity. Bucky used the same kitchen and bathroom as the rest of them, and sometimes sat in a chair and watched the news while Steve snoozed on the couch. (He got the creepy dead eyes again when he watched the news. Sam didn’t like to be in the room when that happened.) But he wasn’t really living with them. He was sharing the space, but not actually abiding in it.

Sam had once read that ghosts walked through walls because the original buildings had had doors or openings there. The houses changed around them, walls went up and down, but they kept walking the original floor plan.

Sam wondered if Bucky would walk through the walls if he could.

When he got home, Bucky was already sequestered in his room, as usual. Just like nothing had happened. Sam made a management decision then and there in front of the fridge, orange juice in hand, not to mention the incident to anybody. He knew if he told Steve, he would do the funny scrunchy worried face and then go try to talk to Bucky about it, and if he told Natasha, she would just shrug and flip her magazine page and not tell him what she actually thought. And something about Bucky’s face had said, _don’t you dare._ So Sam kept quiet. He did a mission. He saved Steve’s ass. He got zapped by Natasha — a mistake (allegedly). He saved Natasha’s ass. Steve saved his ass. All in a week’s work.

But then it happened again. The next week, Bucky was sitting in the second row, just to the left of the podium, with the goddamned hat and the hoodie and that nasty hair tucked behind his ears. But this time Sam didn’t do a double take. No, he kept the most blank poker face of his life. If he’d had that poker face when he was fifteen, he wouldn’t have lost his new bike to DeSean Michaels. He was the very picture of serenity.

So he conducted the meeting. Bucky jumped ship as soon as it was over. Sam went home. He had a beer and avoided the living room while Steve and Bucky did their nightly news thing. He spent the next day in a boring meeting with Natasha and Steve and very resolutely did _not_ draw a dick on Steve’s papers when he got bored - instead, Natasha drew a dick on Sam’s papers. They went their separate ways for lunch, with Steve muttering something that had nothing to do with a lunch date with Sharon and therefore couldn’t possibly be anything else. Doctor Doom attacked a lab in the evening, and they kicked Doom’s sorry metal-plated buns back into the Atlantic. And it would have been perfect, it would have been just fine, except for the shard of laboratory glass that skewered right through Sam’s side.

He was flying, he was good, he was right where he needed to be, between Natasha and Steve. They had cornered Doom in the giant atrium of the lab building, and Sam was swooping down to deliver a shot right to Doom’s visor. But then a bolt of green light sparked, something slammed into his wing, and he crashed, down into the vertical crater of a broken window. The pain was blinding, screaming. Everything was black and noise and pain, and for a few seconds, he couldn’t even remember his own name.

With excruciating effort, he lifted himself back up to lean against the unbroken portion of the glass wall and, with a sick feeling, looked down. There was a three-inch shard of glass protruding from his side, the rest of it buried god-knows how far in. His breathing quickened, but the faster he breathed, the more his muscles moved, and the more it made a scream build inside him.

“SAM!”

Steve was in front of him then, and Sam understood vaguely that this sort of thing was the prelude to Steve’s worst nightmare. He heard Steve say something to Natasha, then he heard Natasha, too. She was talking nonsense, rapid-fire. He realized she was speaking into her communicator. Fuck. Steve was about to stop the mission to get him out of there, because Steve was a goddamned Good Samaritan and he totally _would_ let a supervillain escape just to save one guy.

“If you stop this to take me to a hospital —“ he grunted.

“Just lay still,” Steve said, practiced hands examining the wound. Sam yelled.

“God _dammit,”_ he choked as pain shot through him like acid. “Fuck, I swear will order myself two-thousand dollars’ worth of flowers and fuckin’ teddy bears and charge it all to your card, Steve, I’ll do it. And chocolate, Steve, a shit-load of chocolate.”

“Sam —“

“So much chocolate, Steve —“

“Sam!”

“Don’t you dare wait up for me, you gotta go after Doom — ”

“Natasha’s called in backup,” Steve said patiently. “We’ll get you an ambulance — “

“Fuck backup,” Sam said. “They need Captain America. Jesus, I’m fine, I’m fine — ”

“No, you’re not.”

“I am! Call a medic, I don’t care, but you’re not stopping this for me. C'mon, just go!”

“ _No_ ,” Steve said, and Sam knew that tone of voice. It was the voice he used when there was no fuckin’ way he was letting down.

Inwardly fuming (but just a little pleased), Sam let his head knock back against the glass. “You’re a pain in the ass,” he said.

“Yeah, I’ve been told,” said Steve amicably.

“Medics are on their way,” Natasha said. “Doom’s signature is getting a bit far, Cap.”

Sam looked at Steve. It wasn’t in Steve’s super soldier DNA to leave friends behind, he knew. But he couldn’t let this get in the way of something as important as Doom, on whom they’d been collecting intel for months now, and might not show his ugly metal mug in person again for God knows how long .

“I’m not dying,” he said simply. “I’ll be okay.”

A little bump appeared below Steve’s ear as he clenched his jaw. Sam saw his eyes tracing the wound, measuring the blood loss, looking for paleness in Sam’s lips.

“ETA for the medics?” he said, without looking away.

“Three or four minutes,” Natasha said.

Steve’s lips went thin, but then, with obvious reluctance, he nodded. He looked like he wanted to do something more, like grasp Sam’s shoulder, but given the glass poking out his side, he just settled for that simple nod. “Three or four minutes,” Steve repeated, as if he were reassuring himself as much as Sam. “They know where you are.”

“Cool,” Sam said. “Go kick Doom’s silver-plated nuts for me.”

Steve frowned. “I think the suit is titanium.”

“Oh my god, just — “

“I know, I know, just go.” Steve stood and gave him a sardonic smile, then a salute. “See you soon.”

“Don’t anything that requires a lot of paperwork,” said Natasha as she followed Steve, fingering her metal bracelets. A blue spark danced momentarily at her wrist.

"Like what?" Sam snorted.

"Like die."

The paramedics arrived promptly three minutes later and carried him off on a stretcher with a little blanket like he was a kid who’d twisted his ankle. They stitched him up and knocked him out (possibly in a different order — it was all just a haze of pain at that point). And thus it was with great reluctance (and a lot of threats from Steve to have Natasha block Netflix access) that Sam became a housebound superhero. It really put a damper on his style, he had to say. No jogging, no training, not even trips to the grocery store, at least not until he could walk from room to room without winding himself. He could barely move from the couch for the first couple days. It was dismal. Being injured also meant he had to conserve energy for the important stuff — like moving from the living room to the bathroom every few hours — so Natasha was put on kitchen duty. This wasn’t objectively a bad choice, but as her specialty was the kind of thing Russian babushkas ate for comfort food, Sam had the feeling his first few trips to the gym during his recovery would be especially depressing.

“Now I know how you feel, buddy,” he told Redwing gloomily, as he poked treats through the bars. Redwing twisted his head to pin Sam with a keen black eye, then bobbed downward to pick up the treats. The next weeks were looking to be a study in boredom. Maybe if he was lucky he could get Nat to pick up some books for him from the library. He could get a start on that Game of Thrones thing everybody was nuts about. He still had a few seasons of _24_ to get through as well. Though, to be honest, ever since he started saving the world with Captain America, whatever Jack Bauer did seemed to pale in comparison to his own recent experience.

 

* * *

 

The first few days of his confinement passed in a predictable, sludge-like fashion. He got up and made his way to the living room. He watched _24_. He slept. He woke up and lumbered into the kitchen, where he ate whatever he could scrounge from the lowest shelf of the cupboard. He watched some more TV. He slept. It was like a never-ending sick day, except there was no parent there to wheedle him with juice and oatmeal.

He started getting jumpy, on edge. His fingers itched for something to do. He felt strangely guilty, too.  He should be more productive. He should try to get work done, start on his taxes, _something._ But it was more than that. It was more than the feelings of uselessness, of helplessness. It was also that the more he napped, the longer he slept, the more Riley started to appear.

He dreamed about Riley tumbling from the sky. He saw the fire-trail streaking earthward, the only evidence that Riley had been there at all. He woke up sweating and thought about Riley getting hammered and singing karaoke so loud he got them kicked out. He fell asleep again, and dreamed Riley was trying to bash his face in, again and again, his fist was cold and bright, and Riley was alive and not alive, saw him and didn’t know him. And when he woke up, there was someone in the room with him.

He didn’t register it at first, but as his eyes blinked open, he became suddenly aware of a _presence_ nearby. Immediately he flinched into a defensive half-crouch on the couch, savagely ripping at his stitches and healing tissue. He thought of Doombots, of assassins with metal joints and screeching electric voices. And then he saw a baseball cap and blue eyes. Bucky. Fuck.

“Were you watching me sleep?” Sam snapped, perhaps a little more aggressively than he’d meant to. Riley’s face was still fresh in his mind — a ghostly image beside Bucky’s own. Sam relaxed slowly, sucking in a breath. Wow, he’d really done a number on his healing process. He exhaled a few choice swear words — half in pain, and half in relief that it was not, in fact, a Doombot. He pressed a hand to his bandages, willing the searing ache to fade.

It dawned on him Bucky hadn’t replied, or even moved. Sam looked up again, eyes scanning the dark figure. Bucky was barely even in the room; just standing in the hallway like a statue. He looked simultaneously frozen and coiled to attack, held in the same state of tension from which Sam had just relaxed. Like he’d really expected Sam to jump him. Sam’s heart sank: that was a look he knew all too well.

“Hey, man, where’re you going?” he asked, a little calmer.

Bucky’s jaw clenched as he swallowed. It took a few seconds for words to form. “Out,” he said finally, with the smallest mouth movement allowed.

“Out?” Sam echoed. He frowned, hitching himself up into a better sitting position. “Wait, what day is it? Oh, shit,” he said, “were you going to the group thing?”

Bucky said nothing, but he moved slightly, and glared at Sam. Which Sam took as a yes.

“Man, I’m sorry,” Sam said. “But I’m not going anywhere like this. I’ve already arranged for somebody else to lead the group today.”

Bucky only nodded. There was a silence in which Redwing decided to rattle noisily at his water bottle.

“But, uh,” said Sam, with the feeling that he was going to regret this for the rest of his life, “if you want, you can chill here. We can, uh…watch something. I don’t really have any old movies, but I ‘spose you’ve got to start catching up sometime.”

Bucky looked like he didn’t know what to do with that. Frankly, Sam didn’t know either. He was already wishing he hadn’t said it. The more he looked at Bucky, the more Bucky’s features were starting to warp into Riley’s. Sam blinked a few times. Maybe it was the pain meds. “Well, you just have a think about that,” he said, when Bucky continued to stand stock still. He heaved himself precariously to his feet, wincing as he felt the fresh bruising along his side. “I’m gonna find something snacky around here if it kills me.”

When he returned three minutes later with a bowl of cereal (the best he could do), Bucky was gone. He snorted. Figured. He didn’t know what he’d expected. The Winter Soldier wasn’t just gonna sit down with him and watch The Godfather. He turned the TV on and started a new episode of _24._ But whatever Jack Bauer was doing, Sam wasn’t focused on the TV, or his cereal. He was thinking about Riley. He was wondering what he would do if Riley turned up again with a metal arm and no memory of him. What he would do if he was Riley’s target. What he would do if it was Riley who was still alive, and not Bucky Barnes.

Why did Steve get his best friend back, and not him?

His cell phone rang a couple hours later. He started awake again, looking around groggily. The TV had shut itself off. He must’ve dozed off in the middle of an episode, which meant a tedious rewatch later. Not that he’d been paying attention to the screen much. He picked up the phone and dug the heel of his palm into his eyes as he hit the talk button. He’d been dreaming again, and Riley’s face was burned into his eyeballs.

“This is Wilson,” he said hoarsely.

“Aw, did I wake you up?” said an amused voice.

“What is it, Nat?” He was now doing his best to stretch his cramped legs and arms, but mobility was limited to anything that wouldn’t extend his torso too much. Which meant his back continued to hurt like a son of a bitch.

“Well,” said Natasha, “Doom decided to send some of his little minions into New York — like most of the city doesn’t already need a therapist — so the Avengers get to have a little reunion.”

“Okay, that’s fun,” Sam said, trying to ignore the sinking feeling in his stomach. “When will you be back?”

“Tomorrow. I mean, unless Doom’s tech has improved. Which I doubt.” There was a growling, windy noise beneath her voice — Sam immediately recognized the sound of a car. He should be in there with them, he thought. He wrinkled his nose and picked up the remote to bounce it aimlessly on the couch cushion.

“So Bucky keeps showing up at my group meetings,” he said suddenly.

There was a motor-filled silence.

“Okay.” Natasha’s tone was completely neutral.

Sam rolled his eyes and leaned back into the couch, inwardly kicking himself. Why had he said that? He was just looking for attention now. Jesus Christ.

“Yeah,” he said, “like, have you guys even noticed him leaving? I mean — you know what, never mind. We can talk about it later. Oh, shit, Steve’s not on the line, is he?”

“No,” said Natasha. “But he says hi.”

Faintly, Sam heard Steve’s voice say, “Hey, Sam!”

“He loves you and your weird bird,” Natasha continued. “And he thinks your butt looks good in your uniform.”

 _“Tasha,_ ” said Steve’s voice.

“No? Just me then. Anyway,” Natasha pressed on, “if you get hungry, just order pizza. You can deal without us for a night.”

“Yeah, I know that,” said Sam. He was starting to feel more and more like a teenager on the phone with his parents. “I survived a war without you assholes.”

“Just making sure. Okay, we’re almost at the airfield, got to go. We’ll be thinking of you as we rip off robotic heads.”

“That’s hot.”

“I know. Sweet dreams.”

Sam responded with an uninspired grunt, then hung up. Great. Not only was he unable to live his everyday life, but he was unable to help out his own team. He turned the TV back on, tapping out a violent drumbeat on his legs with one hand and the remote. It wasn’t until the end of the episode that he noticed the text waiting on his phone from Natasha.

_You might want to take Steve’s room tonight._

He squinted at it, unsure if this was the setup of a prank. It seemed pretty heavy handed to be manipulation, though he seriously wouldn’t put it past Natasha to rig something up. But she wouldn’t do that to an injured teammate, would she?

What was he talking about. She totally would. Sam shook his head and put the phone back down. He was not falling for that.

Dinner was - weird. Sam ordered pizza, but got vegetarian just to spite Nat and Steve, if only on some nonexistent psychic plane. He was feeling bitter and grumpy, a feeling that wasn’t even subdued when he told himself, _Sam Wilson, I’m giving you one night to be a grouch_. Usually when he said, _Sam Wilson, I’m giving you one night to be a grouch_ , he felt better almost immediately. Something he’d learned from therapy. Validate your feelings. But tonight it only got worse, until he was actually considering calling up Natasha in the middle of the battle he was sure was raging just to complain about being shut up in the house with Tall Dark And Creepy (even if said creep stayed in his room pretty much 24/7). _No, c’mon, Sam,_ he thought. _You’ve got no reason to be pissed at Bucky. Or anybody, for that matter._ That settled it; this whole thing was getting out of hand. Tonight he would allow himself to grumble and moan about his sorry state, and tomorrow he would get off his ass and start doing something useful. What that would be, he had no idea. But the resolution was there.

The thought of Bucky alone in his room lingered at the back of his mind as he wolfed his first slice of passable vegetarian pizza, but it wasn’t until his third that he started feeling guilty. Reluctantly, he left the half-eaten third slice in the box, loaded a plate with two more pieces, and headed for Bucky’s room. He knocked with one knuckle.

“Hey, Bucky? It’s Sam. I got pizza,” he said.

Nothing happened. He knocked again. There was a muffled rustling noise, footsteps, and the door cracked open. A pair of blue eyes in a pale, unshaven face looked back at him. The room behind him was dark.

“Uh…hey.” Sam thrust out the plate awkwardly. “I hope you don’t mind vegetarian. Um, that means it’s only vegetables,” he added, just in case. Bucky probably didn’t know what vegetarian was. Steve had only been educated about it a few months ago, when he was thrust into a city chock full of vegetarian restaurants.

Bucky took the plate with a low noise that might have been a thank-you. He made as if to close the door, then paused.

“Where are Steve and Natasha?” he said. His voice sounded hoarse, which Sam guessed made sense. Bucky wasn’t the most verbose one in their house. Several weeks of infrequent, monosyllabic conversation would probably make his voice a bit creaky, too.

“On a mission to New York,” Sam replied. “They won’t be back till tomorrow.”

Was it just him, or was there a look of rising panic in Bucky’s eyes? Whatever it was, he and the pizza had disappeared in the next second, and Sam was left on the other side of the door with a muttered word of thanks and a flood of questions rising in his throat.

 

* * *

 

Sam did take Steve’s room in the end, against his better judgement. If he was honest, he’d been secretly dying to sleep on anything other than his own ancient relic of a mattress — it was a dinosaur from his first apartment out of college, when he couldn’t afford any better — and this was just the excuse he needed. He didn’t know why he didn’t just replace his. Something about buying himself an entirely new one just felt extravagant somehow. Especially after deployment. But the opportunity to sleep on something cushy and possibly even memory-foam was not one he could really pass up.

He did inspect the room carefully for Natasha traps — under the bed, in the ceiling vent, in all the bookshelves, in the closet, the sheets, at the carpet seams. He was half expecting to find a horse head, or something else equally weird that only Natasha would find funny. He checked all the photo frames and all over the ceiling for cameras. He even checked for teddy bear cameras, like the ones people bought to spy on babysitters, but this was foiled by the fact that Steve didn’t seem to own any teddy bears. Somehow, the whole idea of cameras was making him especially nervous. Was there a secret industry for undressed superhero pics? There probably was. Frankly, he’d be almost flattered if anybody wanted to buy some clandestine Falcon nudes. Almost.

Maybe, he thought suddenly as he brushed his teeth - maybe Steve had some secret pipeline into a club. _The Twelve Dancing Princesses_ kind of action. And every night at midnight Captain America went through the tunnel and turned up to give a few dames a dance and watch the show. Or maybe he had a secret passage to visit some rich mistress. Or _maybe_ he had strippers come to _him._ Sam started laughing so hard at the thought of Steve awkwardly receiving a lap dance that he spat toothpaste on the mirror. To be fair, the more time he spent around Steve, the more he was forced to reassess the picture of America’s hero as a wholesome white bread and mayonnaise type. Steve was a good guy, but that didn’t mean he had to be sheltered. As a result, the first time Steve made a dick joke, Sam might have actually seen Jesus.

But Steve’s room seemed, somehow, both secret passage- and trap-free. So Sam showered (gingerly, with duct tape and a plastic bag to cover his bandage), changed in the bathroom, turned out the lights, and got into bed, flipping off an invisible camera just for good measure. The pillow smelled like Steve — not that he made a habit of sniffing his teammates. But it smelled like nice aftershave and soap and the hopes and dreams of a nation. It was a bit like when he was a kid, sleeping over at a friend’s house. Their sheets always smelled different from his own. It was as though no two households in the world shared the same combination of sheets and detergent. There had to be a scientific reason for that, he thought, then promptly gave up because, shit, this bed was _comfy._ It wasn’t memory foam, but it was damn near close to those comfort levels. He snuggled down and let himself have one little wicked chuckle. Steve would never have to know. Unless Natasha told him. Which she seemed very likely to do. Which brought him back to why Natasha had told him to take Steve’s room in the first place. His eyes snapped open again, and he stared up at the ceiling. Was something about to come out and spook him?

“I know you’re there,” he said experimentally.

Nothing.

Well, now he just felt stupid. Which was probably what Nat wanted. She’d probably just done it so, no matter where he slept, he spent the whole night tossing and turning, wondering what prank she was playing.

He was about to just hop out of the bed and get back to his own room so he could pretend he never even listened to her, when he heard something. It was a high, keening noise. An animal in pain. Then the sound widened into a yell - grotesque - agonized - a sound that he had not heard before, but could recognize on the spot for what it was.

He thought he knew now why Natasha wanted him to take Steve’s room.

As quickly as he could, he hoisted himself to his feet and stumbled to the door, holding his bandaged side as though that might help him go faster. He slid, barefoot, into the hall, and arrived within seconds at the door to the room next to Steve’s. He pushed it open, and saw exactly what he’d feared after hearing that noise — Bucky entangled in his sheets, limbs jerking in spasms, eyes shut, mouth open in a scream that had long since taken all the breath in his lungs. It was a horrible sight, and Sam swallowed down a painful lump as he took it in. He left the door open behind him and approached slowly; if Bucky came out of this swinging, he would want an easy escape. Bucky was whimpering now - no, not whimpering, _pleading_ , with a voice too ragged with pain to really make a sound. Sam tried, and failed, to imagine what could possibly make a human being make that noise.

“Bucky,” Sam said out loud. Bucky had started to yell again: breathy, anguished bursts of sound. Sam raised his voice. “Bucky. You’re in your room. You’re safe. You’re safe, Bucky - James Buchanan Barnes, you’re safe, no one is going to hurt you.” He didn’t touch him. That was the first mistake people made, he’d learned when he started as a social worker. You never wanted to touch someone who might try to strangle you coming out of it. “Bucky, it’s Sam Wilson, I’m Steve’s friend, you’re okay, you’re safe. Bucky. You’re in Steve’s house.”

As he spoke, Bucky’s body began to relax - slowly, horribly, the spasms becoming farther and farther apart, the shouts quieter. Sam had a feeling it had to do with the name Steve, so he kept saying it, over and over. He was safe. He was in Steve’s house. His name was Bucky. No one was going to hurt him. He was in Steve’s house. The yells became labored breaths. Bucky twitched, jerked - and then finally convulsed as he woke, sitting straight up with a startled yell.

“It’s okay, you’re safe.” Bucky’s wild eyes snapped to fix on him, but he didn’t attack. He just stared, chest heaving. “You’re in your room. You’re in Steve’s house,” Sam repeated. “You’re safe.”

Bucky took in several deep, gasping breaths, gaze still locked on Sam’s, mouth agape. Then something shifted in his eyes. Something changed, came back, fell away. He began to shake, shoulders hunching to brace himself. He blinked several times, and turned his head and began to look around the room. Sam saw him understanding things when he looked at them. He saw him take in his surroundings. Then his shoulders slumped. They were safe.

Bucky swallowed. Sam could hear the dry sounds of his parched mouth. The shaking wasn’t subsiding, but his breathing was slower.

“This isn’t Steve’s house,” Bucky said faintly.

“Well, it’s our house. Me and Natasha and Steve,” Sam amended. “You’re staying with us. We’re in Washington D.C. It’s 2014.”

Bucky nodded slowly. He was staring at the chest of drawers across from the bed, eyes unfocused and blurry. “I remember that,” he said.

“That’s good,” said Sam. He was still standing a yard or so away — just out of arm’s reach. Just in case. “Do you think you can sleep again tonight?”

Bucky shook his head, his hair flopping around his face as he did so. It looked abused and ragged. He needed a haircut. It occurred to Sam that it probably hadn’t been touched since his fall from the train. A few days and weeks here and there out of cryo had let it grow into the mess it was now - and that wasn’t even counting their chase across the world - but Bucky Barnes hadn’t had a haircut since World War II.

“Do you want to watch a movie?” Sam asked. “Uh. Picture, film…whatever you and Steve call them. You’ve got a lot of classics to catch up on.”

Bucky looked at him, and gave the faintest ghost of a nod. Sam sent back a ghost of a smile.

“C’mon,” he said, tipping his head towards the door. “Let’s get you started on some good American cinema.” Bucky stood slowly, as though he wasn’t quite sure his legs would take his weight. Sam waited patiently, then turned to lead him out. Bucky’s arm glinted, bright and cruel, in the hall light as he followed. “I think we’ll skip _Saving Private Ryan_ , though, yeah? Might hit too close to home.”

 

* * *

 

They watched _Cinderella,_ which was both the least racist Disney movie he could find that directly followed 1945, and the least violent thing he could think of. He was itching for a Star Wars rewatch, but he had a feeling that two hours of space fights was the last thing Bucky needed right now.

It was an unusual scene: two fully grown men sprawled on a couch watching singing mice do some girl’s hair. Even if you ignored the mechanical arm and the giant bandage, it was weird. Sam snuck a glance at Bucky during the bit where she started harmonizing with herself in the bubbles. It looked like he’d borrowed some of Steve’s clothes. Sam was pretty sure he’d seen that t-shirt before. God knew they were about the same size, muscle-wise. _Super soldiers_ , Sam thought, suppressing a snort. Bucky looked more absorbed in the cartoon than than he’d ever seen him, and as a result, he looked more relaxed. He got the creepy dead eyes back when he watched the news with Steve — hence Sam’s determined avoidance of the living room in the evenings. But now he was just watching, and the only thing betraying any disquiet was that the toes of one foot were tapping against the carpet, doubletime to the music.

It was odd to see him looking…well - human, Sam thought. For months, Sam had only ever understood the _concept_ of Bucky. He understood that, to Steve, there was no one more important, there never had been. Really, there had never been anybody else in the world except Bucky _._ Bucky _was_ Steve’s world. Sam understood that. He understood that Steve didn’t just love Bucky, he needed him - they were two halves of something dangerous and bright, chasing each other across history in order to find balance again - SteveandBuckyBuckyandSteve. Sam got that. Sam got Steve. But he didn’t get Bucky. Not for a long time.  He chased Bucky with Steve because Steve was his friend, his partner, his teammate. Captain America needed him. So he helped track down an infamous assassin, cause, hey, what else are you gonna do with your summer. They followed him across the States, across Europe. They found him, they lost him, they found him again. They brought him back. Or not _him,_ rather. They brought something back. Sam wasn’t sure it would ever be Bucky. Then they got back and bought the house (cause a team needs a base, right?) — which Sam and Natasha only lived in part-time, cause Sam had his own place and Natasha was just weird like that — and Bucky moved in with them. Of course he moved in. He wasn’t Bucky, not really (not anymore, not yet), but he went where Steve went now. They were falling back into old patterns, old rhythms, shapes fitting together once again. So Bucky (or Not-Bucky) took the room next to Steve’s. And that was where Sam’s knowledge of him ended, because other than the occasional appearance at dinner or in the hall, Bucky didn’t leave that room. Sam wondered what he was doing in there. Putting himself back together, he guessed. Remembering. Relearning. Trying not to kill them all.

He knew Steve talked to him often. Natasha, too, had her little interactions. But Sam really had had no reason to do more than acknowledge Bucky’s presence. He wasn’t his best friend like Steve. He hadn’t had his mind fucked with like Natasha had. He just didn’t _get_ Bucky.

But something was different now. Sam thought a light had been switched on in the last few weeks, perhaps before he even consciously knew it, perhaps even from the moment he first saw Bucky in his group meeting. Because he couldn’t understand Bucky as a concept, not really. That deep, deep _need_ for the wholeness of Bucky was something that only Steve possessed. It wasn’t Sam’s place to understand that.

But Sam did understand something about soldiers. He knew about _them_. And looking at Bucky now, with his lank hair bunched up against the couch and his eyes fixed on Cinderella scrubbing floors, Sam thought he finally did understand something.

Then Bucky smiled a minuscule, microscopic smile as the one of the stepsisters screeched out _Sing Sweet Nightingale_ and Sam understood something else.

It was gonna be a long night.


	2. two

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bucky just stared, and Sam held his gaze. It was like looking into the sight of a rifle; sharp, dangerous. Focused. A breath away from deadly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Does this chapter even have a plot? I don't know. This one's a monster at 6.5K. Thanks to everybody who commented and bookmarked on the first chapter! It's greatly appreciated. Glad to know this is a ship people can get into.
> 
> EDIT: I almost forgot! Natasha's dialogue about how a woman should move is lifted directly from The Name of the Rose. It's a great Black Widow comic, one of my favorite things ever. SO, yeah — I freely admit my plagiarism. Though I mean...this is fanfiction. Okay. Read on.

“So, you watched _Cinderella_.”

“ _Cinderella_. And then _Sleeping Beauty_. And then _Alice in Wonderland_.”

“That’s a trip.”

“Eeyep.”

Sam exhaled, wide-eyed, and brought his coffee mug to his lips. Natasha was draped languidly over a kitchen chair, head tilted, eyes glinting - almost cat-like, in the artificial light. Her long fingers tapped at the rim of her own mug as she watched him.

“It was weird, man,” he said once he’d swallowed. “It was fuckin’ out there.”

“What happened after?” she said. Her face was impassable.

“I don’t know,” said Sam, shaking his head. “I crashed right there, halfway through _Alice in Wonderland_. I think I had dreams about oysters. It was crazy. And I woke up around seven…and - you know,” he shrugged, “he was back in the Land of Misfit Toys.”

He scratched at a hole appearing in the table varnish. Brown dust crunched under his nail. “Thanks for texting me, by the way,” he added quietly.

Natasha tilted her head back, lazily running a thumb down her neck, eyes half-lidded. She didn’t look outwardly tired, but Sam had long since learned that Natasha was better than anyone at hiding exhaustion. He wouldn’t even have suspected anything, except for the fact that Steve had crashed the moment he and Nat got home at three that afternoon. The fight had been long and dirty and apparently enough to make Captain America need to hit the mattress while the sun was still out. He would have thought she’d be asleep, too, since she had no super serum to bolster her endurance. But here she was, sitting with him, drinking coffee at ten at night. She was something else, Sam had to admit.

“Does, um…” he began, frowning down at the little patch of unvarnished wood he’d revealed, “does that happen every night? With the - nightmares? And stuff?”

Natasha’s hooded eyes followed his fingers as he picked away at the table. If she was at all concerned with his blatant vandalism of their communal property, she didn’t let on. “Not every night,” she said, voice low and unusually husky - the only outward indication so far that she might be feeling at less than one-hundred percent capacity. “I don’t think so, anyways. I’m not sure he sleeps that much. I know I wouldn’t.”

“And Steve talks him out of it.”

“Usually. If Steve’s gone, I take his room. To get there faster.”

Sam looked at her. “How did I not know?” he asked.

She held his gaze, her expression just on this side of deeply unimpressed. “Because you sleep like a tranquilized elephant, Wilson.”

“But you knew.”

She made an incredulous noise. “Obviously. You do know what I do for a living, right? Well…did - for a living.” A tiny crease appeared between her eyebrows, and her hands tightened around her mug as she raised it to take a sip. Then she pinned him with a razor-sharp look, as though his being witness to this momentary uncertainty suddenly made him untrustworthy. Sam quickly looked down.

“So, why do you think he keeps showing up at my group?” he asked, trying to sound innocent, neutrally curious, as though he hadn’t noticed anything. He could tell she was still watching him.

“Probably the same reason everyone else is there,” she said, and her voice was suddenly tired. Sam raised his head. She was looking down into her mug.

 “Really?” he said cautiously. “I mean…you don’t think he’s got some…I dunno - _ulterior motive?”_

She raised an eyebrow. “Does he need an ulterior motive to attend a support group?”

“You tell me.”

Natasha rolled her eyes. “Jesus, I’m not a Bucky expert. You want relationship advice, you go to Steve.”

“Okay,” said Sam, rankled, “So, A, this is not relationship advice, this is ‘why the hell does the creepy guy who lives in my house keep showing up at my work’ advice, and B, no fucking way am I telling Steve. I tell Steve, he’ll go all concerned on him and try to talk to him about it.”

“So?”

“So…” Sam hunched his shoulders, trying to find words to fit something that was really just a feeling in the back of his mind. “So, I just don’t think he wants Steve involved. In whatever he’s trying to do. Recover. Re-assimilate. Whatever. I think he wants to do this on his own.”

“Huh,” said Natasha, the corner of her mouth curling wickedly. “And I thought Steve was the go-to for James Barnes analysis.” She tipped back the last dregs of her coffee and scooted her chair back to stand and put the mug in the sink. “And by the way,” she said as she made for the hallway, “I can tell you that people trained to do what Bucky and I did _always_ have an ulterior motive.”

 

* * *

  

Okay, so maybe Bucky had a sweet little private moment watching a sixty-four year-old Disney movie. And maybe during said moment he smiled a little bit and it was a nice smile. That meant nothing. Absolutely nothing. Lots of people had nice smiles, Sam thought, as he gingerly stripped off his t-shirt ten minutes later. He prodded at the tender bruising around his bandage, and immediately regretted it as a sharp ache burned through his muscles. Steve had a nice smile. Steve had a smile made out of Fourth-of-July sparklers and ice cream and apple pie. Natasha had a nice smile, too — especially when she was about to garrote somebody.

He didn’t know if Nick Fury had a nice smile, he mused briefly as he hopped in the shower (Nick Fury wasn’t someone he really wanted to think about at length while he was in the nude). He wasn’t sure he’d ever seen Nicky Fury with any facial expression other than mildly annoyed. Maria Hill didn’t smile much, either. Jesus, _spies_. They had no sense of humor. Though he was pretty sure Natasha found things funny on occasion. He just wasn’t sure what those things were.

And Riley…Riley hadn’t had a smile; he’d had a grin. Always a grin. And not a dopey one or an eternally-happy one — it was a grin that could vivisect if he wanted. Riley, grinning out the HUMVEE window as he smoked. Grinning at Sam over a beer. Grinning into the sight of a rifle. Grinning as he tumbled down into blackness in an explosion of sparks and smoke.

Sam shook his head to clear the image. He felt sick, and stuck his head back under the stream of hot water.

He went to sleep with Riley’s grin like an ache in his teeth.

 

* * *

 

When Sam left his room the next morning, it was to find Steve in the kitchen, chugging half a gallon of water. He smelled like running. The funny thing about the super soldier stuff was that it also enhanced that gross sweaty running smell. But, on the other hand, people probably would have a tough time taking Steve seriously if he came out of a workout smelling like cupcakes.

Sam crouched awkwardly to look in the fridge for breakfast options, since bending at the waist was sort of out of the question. He felt like a senior citizen standing there with his ass sticking out, but if there was anyone in the world who would go out of his way _not_ to tease him about it, he knew it was Steve. If Natasha was there instead, that would be a whole different story.As for the fridge, there was something Russian in a tupperware, and there was cold pizza. _Breakfast of champions,_ he thought. He grabbed the pizza.

“Morning, Sleeping Beauty,” he said as he dropped the cold, grease-stained pizza box onto the table.

Steve took a final swallow of water and resurfaced, wiping his mouth with a grin. “Look who’s talking. You do know it’s eleven AM?”

“I’m a convalescent. It’s my job to sleep like a baby.”

Steve squashed the entire water bottle in one huge hand and tossed it in the recycling bin. “It’s pretty lonely out there without you,” he said.

“So you can run laps around my little frail body, sure,” Sam replied through a mouthful of cold pizza. Steve looked into the box.

“Vegetarian?” he said, with the beginnings of a smirk.

“Shut up,” said Sam, slamming the box closed. Steve suppressed a snort, and Sam very purposefully finished off the piece of pizza, trying to convince himself it was as delicious as a deep dish with sausage and onions would have been.

Steve leaned back on the edge of the counter, arms crossed. His eyes and mouth were suddenly pulled down at the corners. He looked much older. More like the ancient specimen he really was. “Natasha told me what happened,” he said.

“Uh…what, exactly,” said Sam cautiously. If Natasha had told him about Bucky and the group sessions after all, he was gonna march right in her room and give her a piece of his mind -

Steve’s face blanched for a moment in confusion. “Well, last night,” he said. “Bucky.”

“Oh, yeah,” said Sam, looking down to avoid Steve’s gaze as he put the pizza box back in the fridge. “Yeah, that was…it was fine. Really. It’s cool.”

“Have you seen him since?”

Sam let out a short laugh. “He doesn’t talk to me at the best of times, Steve.”

Steve exhaled through his nose. “Yeah,” he said. “I think…it’s hard for him to trust people. Who’ve seen him like that.”

“So does he trust you and Natasha?” Sam asked.

Steve looked at him, and Sam saw his answer writ clearly in the sadness pinching at his face, changing the shape of his eyes.

“I’m just sorry you had to do that,” was all Steve said. He sounded tired. “It’s…it’s hard to watch sometimes.”

“It’s okay. Seriously,” said Sam. He hissed in a breath suddenly, teeth to lips, and straightened to face Steve. “Steve, those fuckers that tried to wipe out the human in him…if I had the choice between saving them or letting them get eaten by sharks, I think I’d cut them to pieces myself. _Real slow_.”

Steve looked at him, chin raised slightly, his expression half startled, half gratified. He nodded. “I know.” His jaw bunched as he thrust it out, bowing his head. “Frankly, I’d probably do the same thing.”

Sam swallowed. The aftertaste of cold pizza was an unpleasant presence on the back of his tongue.

“Sam, I’m gonna ask you a favor,” Steve said, a note of apology in his voice. “If Natasha and I have to be gone again before - before you’re healed - “

“I got you, man,” Sam said. “It’s okay.”

Steve looked relieved. “And you don’t mind? I know it’s brutal to - “

“Steve,” said Sam. “Would _you_ mind?”

Steve went silent, then nodded. That sadness in his face was still there. Sam hadn’t noticed before now, but he knew instinctively it had been there ever since that fight on the causeway. It had been there since Steve had first seen Bucky’s face again amid the wreckage and smoke. Perhaps even before. It was the result of brightness and darkness, two facets of the same truth, crashing together in a collision that had left them both changed. And what was left was a broken soldier alone in his room, and a permanent stain of grief on Captain America’s face.

“Thanks,” Steve said tightly. Then - “But you totally did sleep in my bed,” he added, the smirk returning.

“For, like, two seconds,” Sam protested. “And I was pretty sure the wall was gonna open up and unleash a flood of strippers.”

“What?”

“Never mind,” Sam sighed, patting Steve on the arm as he crossed into the living room. Steve looked perplexed and more than a bit disturbed by the image of a hoard of strippers invading his room. “I’m taking a field trip. I’m going to the grocery store like a normal dude without a band-aid the size of Texas holding him together, and then I’m gonna cook dinner.”

He’d expected Steve to protest, saying he was too weak, he wasn’t recovered yet — but then he saw Steve’s shoulders sag with apparent relief. “Thank God.” He looked up sheepishly as Sam raised an eyebrow. “I can’t do any more of Tasha’s cooking. I’m all for new experiences, but if I have to eat another cold soup I might go on a diet to protest.”

Sam had to prevent himself from laughing to keep from doing new damage to his stitches. “Shiiit,” he said gleefully, “she is going to _skin_ you when she finds out.”

“Yeah, but she won’t find out, because you’re not going to tell her,” said Steve, with a meaningful look.

Sam raised both hands. “My lips are sealed. I’m just saying, she’s probably got the whole place bugged anyway.”

Steve immediately looked up to the ceiling, as though expecting to see cameras and microphones. He shook his head, and let out a resigned sigh. “Whatever.”

“I’m just glad it’s you and not me,” said Sam.

“Ain’t that always the way,” Steve said.

By the time Sam was able to shower, dress and get the the grocery store, it was already approaching the middle of the afternoon. It was unseasonably warm out, too. It was October, it was supposed to be getting chilly, but somehow his clothes still ended up sticking to him on the walk there. He supposed he could have taken the bus, but he was determined to get in some form of exercise on his first trip out of the house. He was doing just fine, too, but in the middle of the diary aisle, he had the painful realization that holding a heavy basket in either hand made his side ache unpleasantly, so he had to transfer his few items to a shopping cart.It was embarrassing, frankly, lumbering down the aisle like an old lady, pushing a giant cart that contained, in total, a gallon of milk, some chicken breasts, greens, and breadcrumbs. It was pathetic.

To add further metaphorical insult to literal injury, he gave in and took the bus the four stops back on the way home. Still, small victories. He’d at least gotten out of the house before his transformation into a vampire was complete.

As he fumbled for his keys at the front door, Natasha came into view, walking smartly down the sidewalk in jeans and heels, a stack of what looked like newspapers under one arm. She raised her sunglasses as she approached.

“Need some help there?”

“No…no, I got this…” he said. One of his keys had become inexplicably hooked onto a hole in his pants, so he had no choice but to stand there with his grocery bags in one hand, twisting back awkwardly as he scrabbled in his back pocket. He could feel his stitches protesting against the strain, but pride prevented him from giving up now. Natasha mounted the stairs and stood next to him, offering no help and smiling inscrutably.

“You know, I had a really great time tonight, Sam,” she said, twirling one finger in her hair.

He shot her a dirty look as he finally got the keyring loose and hastily jammed the house key into the door.

“Hey,” said Steve, as they passed the living room. He was leaning over a tablet on the coffee table, presumably paperwork or intel. The TV was tuned to reruns of Dancing With the Stars.

“You planning to compete?” said Natasha, nodding to the screen, “‘Captain America wows judges with his jitterbug?’”

“I’m not a - jitterbug,” said Steve. “That’s not a dance, Natasha!” he called after her as she swept into the kitchen.

“Dude,” said Sam as Steve turned back round, feeling suddenly irritable and rankled by his own general feebleness, “I was just fighting with my keys, and you coulda let me in the whole time?”

Steve looked baffled. “Geez, I didn’t hear you,” he said earnestly. “I’m sorry.”

Steve looked so genuinely apologetic that something in Sam deflated. “Whoa, it’s okay,” he sighed. “Don’t worry about it.” Jesus, Steve really took the fun out of nagging. He was so fucking genuine that it broke Sam’s heart to think he might’ve hurt Captain America’s feelings.

Sam followed Natasha to the kitchen, where she helped herself to water as he unloaded his shopping bags. The stack of newspapers was on the counter beside her.

“What’re those for?” he said.

She ignored this. “Are you cooking?” she asked, eying the box of bread crumbs.

“Yep,” he said.

“Good,” she said. “It’s been fun, but I’m getting bored of torturing Steve with borscht.”

Sam turned to grin at her. “You son of a bitch,” he said.

“Well, technically, I am the bitch,” said Natasha, and with a blur of red hair, she was gone.

Sam poked his head into the living room. “You hear that?”

“Eeyup,” came Steve’s voice. Sam could see the the back of Steve’s head from here; his ears were bright pink.

Two hours later, Sam was pulling breaded chicken from the oven and feeling markedly better. Something about cooking let him shut his brain off in a way that he hadn’t been able to since his injury. He felt useful again. Natasha wandered in first to grab a plate, then disappeared again. Steve made appreciative noises as he loaded up on rice and greens, but he eventually went back into the living room, where he was still dividing his attention between work and Dancing With The Stars. Leaving Sam alone in the kitchen. Sam wasn’t averse to solitude, quite the opposite. He liked his space. But he’d had a helluva lot of solitude lately.

Without really thinking, he began to make another plate for Bucky, as had become habit. Usually — the last couple nights notwithstanding — he set out a plate and Bucky came to eat on his own time, sitting silent and stiff at the kitchen table. It was like owning a very antisocial house cat. Sometimes he migrated into the living room to do his nightly news thing with Steve. Sometimes he just disappeared back into his room.

But thirty minutes went by, then an hour, and no sign of Bucky. Sam ate his own dinner, and did everyone else’s dishes. Still nothing. He glanced into the living room, to see Steve still bent over his tablet, though he seemed to be paying more attention to the TV than his work. Every once in a while he swiped at the tablet screen in a weary sort of way. He was looking over his shoulder frequently, as though expecting someone to be there.

Sam heaved a sigh, and picked up the cold plate of food. He zapped it in the microwave for a bit until it started making crackling sounds, then padded out of the kitchen and down the hall, towards the last bedroom on the right.

“Don’t worry,” he said as he passed the living room. “I’m on it. Make sure he hasn’t been kidnapped or OD’d or something.”

He heard Steve grunt his thanks as he approached the closed bedroom door. He rapped on the doorframe. “Room service,” he said. He hoped this wasn’t about to become an episode of a cop drama — door opens to show room ransacked, window open, drapes flapping in the breeze —

The door opened and Bucky looked back at him from behind his curtain of hair. He was wearing a white undershirt and sweatpants — again, probably a gift from the House of Rogers haut couture.

“Uh, hey. I cooked this,” Sam said, offering the plate with a distinct sense of déjà vu. “So it’s back to normal. No more Russian food. Though, I dunno, maybe you like…Russian food, since…um. Anyways. You didn’t come to eat, so I had to reheat it, so…that’s why it might not be good as usual. Not that my food is _amazing_ , or whatever, just, - yeah. Here you go.”

Bucky took the plate, his face expressionless - and closed the door.

Wow. Okay then.

Sam stood there with both eyebrows raised for a good ten seconds, then set off back to the kitchen. Whatever. He obviously didn’t want to be bothered but - Jesus, he hadn’t broadcasted that much _fuck you_ since they first cornered him on their _Operation: Hunt Down Bucky_ road trip. Back then, he’d spat and fought and beat them up more times than Sam could count. _Don’t fucking call me that. I’m not him. Don’t you fucking call me that._ It had taken a confrontation in an old Hydra base and a few common enemies to make him warm to them. And now here he was. Still swinging between tapping his toes to Disney songs and closing doors in peoples’ faces. Sam wondered vaguely if he did this kind of stuff to Steve and Natasha. Was Sam just special because he got stony silences instead of any real interaction? He almost laughed to himself. Yeah. Real special.

“He’s in there,” he told Steve.

He saw Steve’s chest rise and fall in a sigh. “Thanks,” he said.

On the other hand, Sam thought later, as he closed the door to his own room, he didn’t really blame Bucky. They had no history other than shooting at each other. And that one time Bucky tore off his wing. So, maybe Bucky needed to sort out how he felt about people like Nat and Steve before he could tackle how he felt about everyone else. Sam wasn’t sure why it bothered him so much, anyways. Bucky was weird. Bucky was creepy. Bucky was tragic and damaged, and obviously had a long way to go before he had himself sorted out.

Really, Sam thought — he just wanted Bucky to let him help. But that didn’t look like it was an option.

 

* * *

 

The next few days saw Sam doing a lot less sitting on his ass, and a lot more busywork that he was still able to convince himself was productive. He cleaned a bit, cooked a lot, and watched too much _24_ as he did so. It was only when Steve jokingly asked if he’d like to iron the newspapers, too, that he realized he was dangerously close to becoming a fifties housewife in a flowery apron. After that, he made himself get out of the house. Admittedly, lunch by himself was a bit boring, but one afternoon he did manage to drag Natasha along. She spent the entire time deducing things about the other people in the restaurant — the girls behind Sam were a couple, but couldn’t tell the adults sitting opposite; the waiter was a struggling actor (“Come on. I could’ve guessed that one,” Sam complained); the guy at the next table was cheating on his girlfriend with two or more women; someone else was homeless and trying to hide it from their boss.

At one point, she went very still, and then excused herself to go to the bathroom. She came out a few minutes later, followed shortly by a middle-aged man in a suit, who sat down at his table across the patio, visibly pale and shaking.

“What was that?” Sam asked, unnerved in spite of himself.

“What?” said Natasha, reseating herself.

Sam gave her a _don’t fuck with me_ look. “Guy in the suit looks like he’s gonna shit himself.

“I just had a little chat with him, that’s all.” She turned a pair of cool green eyes on him. “I see his wife sometimes when I get coffee. I know how a woman should move. And I know how a woman moves when she’s in pain. He’s going to divorce her and give her a lot of money, or I’ll keep coming for him - again, and again, and again.”

“Shit,” said Sam.

He sometimes forgot who Natasha had been once - super spy, assassin, brain-washed victim, what have you. Perhaps it was because it was so difficult to figure out who she was even now. She could be eternally without history, always changing herself to create a blank slate for the rest of them to project on. It was so easy to forget that a real person lived inside her. He instantly liked her better now that he’d been reminded.

That evening, he called his boss and managed to get himself at least partially back to work. He would lead his group tomorrow, but he wouldn’t be allowed to have any of his caseloads back until he was fully healed and could be reliably on call for emergencies. Not to mention, he was still cut off from doing any work with Natasha and Steve. His boss kept rambling about how good it would be to have him back, but all Sam could think of was what the hell he would find to fill his extra time, since he’d probably watched enough _24_ for a lifetime.

When he hung up the phone with a sigh, it was to glimpse a shadow in sweats and a t-shirt disappearing around the hall corner. The plate he’d set on the table was gone. He suddenly understood the whole thing about Natasha and Bucky being trained by the same wackos. Jesus, it was lucky they had him and Steve around, cause somebody needed to walk around this house making the normal about of noise and not like they were about to assassinate someone.

As he got into bed later after another plastic bag-covered shower, Sam decided he really truly hated everything about being injured. And, most especially, he hated Victor Von Doom and laboratory windows.

In the strange, grey moments before true drowsiness took him over, he realized that if Bucky had overheard him, it meant he knew the group meetings were back on. Maybe he would actually go tomorrow.

It didn’t really occur to him to think that the group meetings had been going on the whole time, the only difference being that he himself had been absent. Instead, his eyes drooped shut as he imagined, in glorious detail, a special place in Hell where Doom might eternally have glass poked in strategically uncomfortably places, and it was with this happy thought that he drifted off to sleep.

 

* * *

 

The next day brought with it a strange sense of trepidation. Sam was scatter-brained as he dressed, and was only alerted to the fact that he’d buttoned his shirt one button off when he tried to tuck it into his slacks. He told himself there was nothing to be anxious about just going back to work — in fact, he should be glad. It would finally give him something worthwhile to do. It was another stepping stone towards being a fully functional version of himself again. But something still made his palms get uncomfortably sticky as he walked into the VA and began to drag chairs into formation. He watched people trickle in, arriving in ones or twos. Many of them greeted him with excitement or relief that he was doing well. He listened to several stories to catch him up on their goings-on. But one eye was still fixed firmly on the door, looking for a familiar square-shouldered figure.

The meeting started. The group proceeded normally, practically as though Sam had never been away. There were a few new faces, and some that had moved on while Sam was absent. Every time a straggler, arriving late and apologetic, entered the room, Sam’s head snapped round, searching for the baseball cap, the long hair. The meeting went on, fifteen minutes, thirty minutes, an hour. But James Buchanan Barnes was a no-show.

Afterwards, Sam put on a game face, smiling and slapping backs, giving out hugs and comforting words as the room eventually began to clear. But once the last person was gone, he was left in a room filled with metal chairs, feeling annoyingly empty. He wasn’t sure why it bothered him so much that Bucky hadn’t shown. Maybe it was because he’d thought he’d finally made some kind of human connection with him, seemingly the last person in the house to do so. The visits to the VA group meeting had also been a sign that maybe, just maybe, Bucky was starting to find a way to help himself. And yeah, sure, the whole thing about watching Disney movies with him into the small hours of the morning had been nice, too. But - shit. Sam sighed and began to stack chairs. This was a fucking mess, and he was right in the middle of it.

When he got home, he deliberated at the front door for a split second, then headed straight for Bucky’s room.

“Hi there,” he said, without preamble, when the door opened. Bucky looked back at him like he was from outer space. “You missed the meeting.”

Bucky’s jaw stiffened. “So?” he said flatly.

“So, I dunno,” said Sam. “I thought you were trying to go to them. Trying to get better.”

Bucky’s shoulders rose; an imperceptible steeling. “I’m trying to be left alone,” he said, in a tone that in no uncertain terms indicated that that was what Sam should do. And as quickly as possible.

“Then why the hell did you show up those two times?” Something like anger was bubbling in Sam, despite all his training to keep calm, and it was making him brash. “You sure have a strange way of wanting to be left alone. Sure, you need your space. I get that. But people wanna help you, it’s as simple as that. I wanna help.”

Bucky’s lips grew thin. “I don’t want your pity,” he said, voice low, barbed and sharp. A warning growl.

“You don’t have my _pity,_ ” said Sam baldly, “you have my _respect_. You have my respect for still existing after everything they did to you, and you had my respect for showing up those two times.”

A snorting, cold laughing noise escaped Bucky’s throat. “Oh, I _had_ it?” he spat, “I _had_ it, okay, but one time I need a fucking day off suddenly I’m a psychopath again, is that it?"

“You know it’s not like that. Look, in an ideal world, I’d know exactly how you felt — “

“You have _no_ idea — “ Bucky’s teeth were bared in a grimace, a sneer.

 _“I know that_ ,” Sam said, plunging on, knowing that with each word he spoke, he was raising his chances of being throttled, “but the point is at least I’d know exactly what you needed! But I don’t. You’re gonna have to tell me what you need. And let me tell you one thing — if this has anything to do with that night last week —“

Bucky stiffened, glaring fixedly at Sam as though he couldn’t decide whether to rip off his head or tear out his guts.

“See, that _is_ something I know about,” Sam said, squaring himself to Bucky. “Don’t fucking patronize me, cause I know about soldiers. I work with them for a living. I am one. So if you’re afraid I’ve seen you weak and vulnerable, if you’re afraid that I’d _ever_ use that against you, you are dead wrong. I know it won’t stop the fear, cause believe me, that fear, that not-trusting, that might never go away. But here’s something you gotta hold in your mind: I don’t think you are weak for feeling something. So you can tell me to fuck off, and I will. I will get out of your way when you come down the hall if that’s what you really need to get better. But you’ve gotta know that there’s not just two people in this house that care, there’s three. Okay? You got that?”

Bucky just stared, and Sam held his gaze. It was like looking into the sight of a rifle; sharp, dangerous. Focused. A breath away from deadly.

Then, Bucky moved. He moved backwards, drawing back and into himself, back into his room. But he didn’t close the door.

Sam stood there, unsure of how to proceed. Was this an invitation to enter? Or simply an indication that Bucky couldn’t care less? Was the conversation over? Sam stood there for several seconds, then took a cautious step forward. “Uh, is that — can I…come in?” He received no response, but his head remained connected to his shoulders, which was encouraging. He took another tentative step and looked around the door.

His first impression was that he’d stepped right into a room inhabited by a conspiracy theorist. The walls were entirely covered, plastered with newspaper clippings. Every available bit of space had been somehow appropriated to fit at least some minuscule piece of paper. He’d been unable to see it in the dark and panic of that night last week, but with the orange sunset filtering through the blinds, the entire room was laid bare. Faces and headlines looked down at him, images made lazy-eyed and muted in the shadows where the slatted sunlight didn’t reach.

“So, uh,” he said awkwardly, “this is what you do all day,” he said. Bucky was bent over the desk in the corner; the entire desk surface was covered with stacks of newspapers. “Shit. Where’d you find all these?”

Bucky was still turned away, as though Sam wasn’t even present. As thought Sam hadn’t just barged in and practically yelled at him —

“Natasha gets them.” Bucky straightened to pin a clipping to the wall, carefully choosing a place that covered the least of what was already there.

Sam blinked. “Wow,” he said. “Uh…wow.” Well, that explained the newspapers under Natasha’s arm. Mystery solved.

He watched as Bucky flipped the page of one of the newspapers and set to cutting out something. He lifted the clipping up to the light, then turned, eyes scanning the walls to find a place to pin it. When he crossed the room, he moved around Sam as though he were furniture. 

Sam’s eyes followed Bucky’s hands — one flesh, one metal — as he pinned the clipping to the wall. _Drone Strike Kills 7_ , _Another 16 Wounded,_ said the headline. And - next to it - _Howard and Maria Stark Die in Car Accident on Long Island_. Sam felt something catch in him, like a jolt after missing a step. He didn’t move, even after Bucky had turned away and headed past him back to the desk. He just continued to stare at the long-dead face of Howard Stark gazing blankly back out of the clipping. The face of a man Bucky had killed.

“Why are you doing this?” Sam said, turning towards Bucky.

Bucky’s eyes flicked to Sam, to the wall and the article, and then back, before he resumed scanning the newspaper.

“To know what I did to the world,” he said.

Sam stared. “Jesus…” he said, incredulity and horror building in his chest like water behind a dam, “so - what - this is all just some fucked up punishment?”

Bucky’s eyes found his. There was that sharp, dangerous look again - like barbed wire sunk into blue. Pained. Cruelly honest. And, at the moment, just the slightest bit confused.

“No,” he said.

It sounded like the truth, because it was that one simple word. Sam remembered the childlike, blank stare that he’d had when they’d first fought. It had made him seem less human, more weapon. Only traces of that remained now, but there was still something childlike in that word. _No_. It wasn’t a punishment. It was curiosity. It was thirst.

Then Bucky looked away, and Sam’s vision reeled, no longer anchored by that blue stare.

“Oh,” said Sam.

He pulled in a breath and took a step towards the nearest wall. His head tilted back to take in the collage of stories, of deaths, of elections and wars, old and new — some were photocopies, others printouts, some torn unceremoniously from yellowed, ancient papers, and some from just the day before.

“So this is the world you helped make,” he said.

Bucky didn’t answer, but he hadn’t gone back to the newspaper. He just stood in front of the desk, eyes flickering from the wall to Sam, from Sam to the wall, back and forth.

“I dunno, man,” Sam continued, “Looks like you haven’t got a lot of pop culture up here. How you doing on that?” Bucky looked at him blankly. “You know…Elvis, rock n’ roll…MTV…the Kardashians.”

“The whats?” said Bucky. He seemed thrown by this sudden change of subject. Wary.

“C’mon, you can’t do all this research and not include the Kardashians,” said Sam. “Okay, new project — Bucky needs to catch up on American pop culture.”

The wariness became something else. “Well, I’ve already seen _Cinderella_ ,” Bucky said. The corner of his mouth was indented in a way that could _almost_ be construed as a smile. Whoa. He was amused. That was…different.

“And _Sleeping Beauty_ ,” said Sam.

“And the one with the rabbit.”

“ _Alice in Wonderland,_ ” Sam corrected. “Seriously, that book was a classic even before Disney started tripping acid. You gotta know that one.”

Something in Bucky’s face became shuttered. “I don’t remember it,” he said. He turned back to the newspaper.

“That’s okay. I actually never read the book,” said Sam after a beat. “I always liked the movie thought. Creeped me out, but I liked it.”

Bucky had begun to cut up the newspaper again. Sam watched him with the increasing sense that Bucky was done here. The conversation was over. Shit, he shouldn’t have told him he should remember that book, he must get that fifty times a day: _you should remember this, you should remember, remember, remember._

 _Nice, Sam,_ he thought, _real smooth._ He was just about to start bowing his way out of there, when Bucky spoke again:

“You in the habit of liking things that creep you out?” he said.

Sam froze mid-step, momentarily fazed. Then he shrugged. “I like figuring them out. Then they don’t scare me.”

Bucky finished pinning up an article about a singer breaking a record set by the Beatles. His metal fingers lingered on the curling newsprint. Sam wondered if he could feel anything with that arm. Like, proper sensory input. Could he feel heat, cold, touch? Or was it only the bare minimum of information - how tightly he was holding a gun, in what direction, how much pressure to exert to pull the trigger, how hard to swing to bash someone’s face into oblivion. One silver index finger trailed over the printed headline.

Then Sam got a crazy idea.

“Hey,” he said suddenly, without even stopping to think if this was a _good crazy_ or a _bad crazy_ idea, “Would you, uh…do you want me to show you some music? I can make you a CD. The best stuff since the forties. I mean, since we are talking about pop culture — this is stuff you gotta know.”

Bucky turned, and surveyed him cooly, then…whoa, yeah, that was definitely something resembling a smile. Weird. Bit twisted. Oddly nice.

“Sure,” he said. “Why not.”


	3. three

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I’m still waiting on the music you promised. The pop culture,” said Bucky, with a sardonic inflection that told Sam he was being quoted. And there was that tiny, grim smile — a smile that might’ve once looked cocky on a dark-haired Sergeant in his pressed new uniform. Sam did his best not to look at it because it made his guts do something weird and complicated that he’d rather not think about.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Finally! Chapter three is here. I'm sorry for the delay, all — I had finals and then a really bad case of writer's block. Thanks (as always, really) to Lenka/isleofapplepies for the feedback and encouragement and plotting and…everything really. Your brain is diamonds and I don't think I'd ever get anything written without you. Enjoy! 
> 
> CONTENT WARNING: some casual ableist language. Clint's behavior specifically will be addressed, because it is important to his character and the themes of this work. But if you're easily triggered or upset, proceed with caution, my friends.
> 
> I should also note that, since Jeremy Renner is the walking version of a snail in looks and personality, my personal choice for Clint Barton is Aaron Tveit looking scruffy and unshaven and bandaged.

Sam Wilson was a smart guy. He _knew_ he was a smart guy. He could mental-math the discount on his groceries and understand most of what he read in the Business section of the New York Times. He made a living helping people find their way out of the mazes of their own brains; he was all good on emotional intelligence. And so far, he was somehow clever enough to get by in the nutty superhero world he’d landed in. Or, at least, he wasn’t dead yet. Whatever that meant.

To put it simply: he wasn’t Tony Stark, but he did okay.

But at the moment, he was feeling like he’d made a spectacularly dumb decision. Puffing along the Mall, his side a dull ache against the sharp seizing in his legs, he felt less smart and more like gasping a string of profanities at the skinny kids that jogged past him every few minutes. _Fuck you and your Lululemons and your tiny-ass legs making you go faster than me fuck me you fucked it up Wilson jesus fucking christ mary joseph and the donkey in the stable._

Or something along those lines.

It had seemed like a good idea when he’d woken up that morning and caught Steve on the way out for a run. He’d been feeling better the last week; the bruising on his side was subsiding, and he could move around without anything hurting too much. It had seemed totally logical to ask Steve to wait a sec while he pulled on some running shoes. “I gotta get back in shape somehow,” he’d said. He wished he could time travel so he could go back and slap himself.

His sweatshirt was already sticking to him after only about ten minutes, and there was a terrible wheezing noise issuing from his mouth with each breath. He was pretty sure his heart and lungs had shrunk two sizes in the last month of being indisposed. He was a walking Grinch Who Stole Christmas.

It didn’t help that Steve had looped around him about twice the normal amount already. Each time, Sam could hear Steve’s footsteps slow down behind him in a valiant effort to keep this tally as low as possible. Steve would smile and shout something encouraging as he passed, but it was really no good. Sam was now in a foul mood and no amount of encouragement from anyone could fix it.

The last time Steve passed him, he was holding a white paper bag. He slowed down to jog at Sam’s pace.

“What’s in the bag,” Sam panted.

“Art stuff,” said Steve. He was barely even power-walking to keep up. Sam exhaled in a wheezing cough and finally gave up the run. Who was he kidding. He was more likely to hurt himself if he pushed it. “Needed some masking fluid.”

“Groovy,” said Sam, bent double with both hands on his knees. “You know, you shoulda been painting my portrait, all this time I’ve been sitting on my ass.”

“You’ll get back into it,” said Steve bracingly. “Anyway, what would I paint? ‘The Falcon in repose, watching another episode of _24?’”_

Sam straightened to squint at him balefully.“You’re a fuckin’ smartass for a national treasure.”

“Nah, I’m just an art student.” Steve grinned. Sam delivered a tired punch to his arm and set off again down the Mall.

When they got home, there was a man sitting at their kitchen table.

“Morning, boys,” said Natasha from the coffee pot. The man turned around to look at them as she spoke. He was blond and stubbly, and he was currently cramming most of a banana into his mouth. 

“Barton,” said Steve by way of greeting, clapping a hand on his shoulder. The man grunted something that might have been a “hey,” but his mouth was so full it was hard to tell. Instead, he thrust out the hand not holding the banana peel towards Sam, who shook it.

“Clint Barton,” the man said once he had swallowed - rather an incredible feat.

“Sam Wilson.”

“Nice.” Clint threw the banana peel at the trash across the kitchen, shooting Sam a grin when it landed perfectly in the bin.

“Show-off,” Natasha murmured as she sat down.

“No, that was not showing off,” said Clint, “that was natural skill.”

Sam grabbed the orange juice from the fridge, suddenly grateful that he was healed enough to bend properly instead of doing the awkward crouching business in front of strange Avengers. Steve had already downed an entire water bottle by the time Sam got the lid off. Steve chucked the bottle in the recycling, waved at Clint, and then headed down the hall. Clint and Natasha watched him go.

“Okay,” Clint said, hushed, once they heard Steve’s door close, “so, yeah, I followed the signature and there was fuck-all. None of the equipment was moved. It’s all rusted to hell now, anyways. You couldn’t use it if you tried. Plus, nobody’s got the programming —“

“Unless somebody _does_ have the programming,” Natasha said. Her thumbs were pressed pink and white into the rim of the coffee mug. She turned to look at Sam. “You’re not going to tell Steve any of this,” she said. It sounded like a promise.

“Uh,” said Sam, “I wouldn’t even if I knew what you were talking about.”

“I traced a Doombot signature into an old KGB compound,” said Clint, after a glance at Natasha. “The one where they…uh…”

“The Red Room,” said Natasha flatly. “Where they programmed me.” Her face was blank, but Sam thought she might chip her mug if she pressed the rim any harder.

“Yeah. That,” said Clint, hunching his shoulders. “But nothing was gone or moved or anything. I checked it against old intel from when it was abandoned. Nothing different except for the dust.”

“Doom doesn’t need to take anything to figure out how it works,” said Natasha.

“Wait, what are you saying?” Sam interrupted. “Doom’s trying to create himself a new Black Widow?”

“Nah,” Clint said, shaking his head, “Doom’s got a billion robots to do what he likes. He doesn’t need more spies, and he sure as hell doesn’t need a one-person strike team. He has himself for that.”

“So, what - he’s been hired to figure it out?”

“It’s possible,” said Natasha, finally taking a sip of her coffee. “But he’s already loaded. And Doom takes it as a point of pride that his technology is only rivaled by Stark’s. Maybe he just wanted to see how this stuff ticked.”

“Maybe,” echoed Clint. There was more hope in his voice than certainty. “Uh, speaking of metal people…where’s the tin man?”

“What?” said Sam.

“Captain raccoon. Mister freezer burn.” Clint made a strange noodly gesture with his left arm. “The hermit you got living down the hall.”

“He’s in his room,” said Sam. “Like he always is.” He raised his eyebrows. “I can get him if you want.”

“No, dude,” said Clint with a look of instant panic. Natasha snorted. “No, seriously. There’s enough crazy in here already. Like, speaking as a crazy person.”

Sam gave a short laugh, though he didn’t know what about that was especially funny. Taking a final swig of orange juice, he screwed the cap back on and replaced the bottle in the fridge. He knew vaguely that Clint Barton had been on the wrong side of the fight before it hit New York. Some alien tech had fucked with his brain and made him do things he’d never have done otherwise. But he kept this knowledge to himself. God knew Barton was probably well aware of it, every waking moment. Still — _crazy_ seemed a strong word to use.

As he turned back, he heard the distinctive low buzz of a vibrating phone muffled against a body.

“Not me,” said Clint unhelpfully.

Natasha drew her phone out of her pocket, and glanced dispassionately down at the ID. If it was possible for someone to roll their eyes without actually moving their eyeballs, Natasha did it.

“I left the file with Pepper, if that’s what you’re calling about,” she drawled into the phone, rising and walking briskly towards her own room. “No — he’s here in D.C. He’s drinking all my coffee…”

Clint scowled down into his empty coffee cup as her voice became muffled behind a closing door, then shrugged and went to pour himself more. “You want some?” he asked Sam. Sam shook his head. “Suit yourself,” Clint said.

Sam busied himself with making a ham sandwich while Clint went back to the table. When Sam sat down opposite a minute later, sandwich in hand, Clint looked at him - and then continued to look at him. It was a scrunchy, curious look, at once shrewd and a bit uncomfortable. Sam looked back, chewing on a bite of his sandwich. Something about Clint made him want to keep his cards close. Maybe because he knew Clint would tell Natasha whatever he said. Or maybe because he was being stared down by a man whose own rather coarse earnestness seemed like a cover for something sharper, more brittle.

As they sat there, Sam heard the distant sound of a knock. Clint made a face like he wanted to say something. There was a pause in which he heard Steve’s voice — a silence —

_CRASH._

Sam leapt up, everything alert, every nerve electric. Sprinting down the hall with Clint on his heels, he heard Natasha’s voice, low, dangerous, unintelligible as they turned the corner —

What he saw as he skidded to a halt was this: Natasha was positioned just outside Bucky’s room, a taser held to Bucky’s neck as he loomed in the doorway, somehow still terrifying even in his t-shirt and sweats. Steve was crumpled against the floor behind Natasha. There was a crater in the wall in the shape of Steve’s back, and his head and shoulders were white, dusted with fragments of plaster.

“What’s going on?” Sam said.

Nobody answered. Bucky’s shoulders rose and fell in terrible, tremendous swells, breaths forced rapidly through his nose. Both his and Natasha’s jaws were clenched tight, the veins in their necks corded, their entire bodies tensed for the inevitable attack. Natasha’s hand gripping the taser was white. Sam heard a soft whirring noise as something worked inside Bucky’s arm, which shone brightly in the dusty afternoon light.

“Fuck,” he heard Clint exhale behind him.

Natasha was speaking, but Sam didn’t understand the words coming out of her mouth. He listened harder - maybe the blood pounding in his ears was making it difficult to hear. Then he realized: she was speaking Russian. She was saying something over and over, a word he didn’t know. It sounded like “let go,” but that wasn’t right, that wasn’t right at all —

“Natasha, it’s okay, I’m sorry,” said Steve weakly, drawing himself up. Bucky twitched as Steve rose, and Natasha inhaled, sharp, raised the taser higher. She said the word again, tied it in with more words, a soft, warning drone of Russian like a prayer before a hanging.

“I’m sorry,” Steve said again. Sam blinked as he said it. Some alarm within him suddenly blared that something was wrong here, everything was wrong. He took a step forward, tensing to fight. “I’m sorry,” Steve repeated. He sounded close to tears. That was what was so wrong. Steve Rogers sounded like he might cry. He was looking at Bucky as he said it, looking at him as if he’d never seen anything more beautiful or sad in his entire life. And Bucky was looking right back, as though he wanted to wipe that expression off Steve’s face with his metal fist.

“Just get out of here,” Natasha said in English. “We’ll be fine.”

Steve stared at her blankly for a moment, then nodded, several times, rapidly. He pushed past Sam and Clint, head bowed. A few seconds later, the front door slammed.

There was a horrible, screeching silence. Then Natasha began to speak Russian again. Softly, calmly. This time Bucky seemed to listen. His eyes found hers, face hardening into an unreadable expression. That single moment seemed to stretch into an entire litany of murmured Russian. Then, finally, Bucky stepped back through his door. Natasha lowered the taser.

Sam and Clint approached slowly. As the room came into view, Sam saw that Bucky had sat himself on the edge of the bed, his hunched profile taut and still. Natasha was watching him, her body matched to his in stillness.

“What’s this?” said Clint. Sam turned to see Clint picking something up off the ground. It was a watercolor painting on thick paper, about six by eight inches. He saw a wash of crimson, orange and yellow, ridges and lines, and a blue sky beyond.

“Looks like the Grand Canyon,” Sam said after a moment of examining it.

“Steve was trying to give it to him,” Natasha said. Her face was a smooth mask, still watching Bucky as he sat with his head bent, elbows on his knees, fingers latticed through the mess of his hair.

“Why? _”_ said Clint. Natasha didn’t respond. Clint looked to Sam, who shrugged. 

“Because,” came Bucky’s voice, muffled and tight, from within his room, “he said that I always wanted to see the Grand Canyon.”

 

* * *

 

It was remarkable, Sam thought later, how much bitterness one person could cram into a dozen words.

 

* * *

 

It seemed pointless to go back to drinking coffee in the kitchen after that, so Sam escorted Clint to the front door. Everything felt dangerous and hyperreal, all the edges sharpened as he watched Clint grab another banana from the kitchen and fumble with his coat. Sam couldn’t get the sound of Bucky’s voice out of his head. It echoed there long after Natasha had closed Bucky’s door and gone back to her phone conversation with Tony Stark, the only difference now being that she hovered in the hallway, eyes fixed on the last door on the right.

“Tasha told me you had a movie night with Barnes,” Clint said abruptly as they neared the front door, finally managing to thrust one arm into his coat. Proper fall weather had finally set in a few days ago.

Sam frowned slightly as he watched Clint struggle to put the hand holding the banana through the other sleeve. “You could say that,” he said. The corner of his mouth twitched with something that felt more a grimace than a smile. “You know, for being an ex-spy, Natasha is really spreading this information around.”

“I’m special,” said Clint dismissively.

“She told Steve, too.”

“‘Course she did. Steve wants to know when the guy takes a piss,” Clint said. “Point is, though — be careful.”

Sam raised an eyebrow, one thumb worrying at the cool, smooth surface of the front door-nob beside him. “Yeah?” he said.

“Yeah,” Clint said, matter-of-fact, “You’re falling into the same trap as Steve.” He shoved the banana into his coat pocket as he spoke. “So, okay, sure - maybe you had a cute moment with the Disney movie. But get over it, okay? He’s a fuckin’ mess, and the solution ain’t gonna be knitting.”

“Knitting has been proven to reduce symptoms of anxiety and PTSD,” Sam said cooly, releasing the doorknob to cross his arms. Clint’s sudden insistence on giving unlooked-for advice made Sam want to block him at every turn. Childish and petty, sure. But science had his back on the knitting thing.

“Yeah, whatever,” said Clint. “What I’m saying is, he’s not Bucky. Everybody in this country grew up on these legends, on Cap and Bucky Barnes. Believe me: that ain’t him. And you and Steve running around trying to make him your average American Joe won’t do a goddamn thing to make him more of a person. And, shit, even then, man — him getting better won’t end with Steve getting his best friend back. Don’t try for that, cause it won’t end well. He’s got to level out.”

Sam bit the inside of his cheek in silence.

“I know,” he said finally.

“Good,” said Clint, and gave a crooked smile. The effect was charming enough to be disconcerting.

“Any particular reason why you’re telling me this?” Sam asked.

Clint shrugged. “I guess I got a soft spot for crazy people like me.”

Before Sam could respond, Clint smiled wider, then pulled the door open for himself and marched down the steps to the street.

 

* * *

 

It was past midnight when the front door finally opened again and Steve appeared as a tall, pale figure in the dim foyer. Sam heard the snap of the door closing, and watched Steve approach from his position on the couch. The TV was tuned to Iron Chef America, and Sam was half dozing, half watching as he lay with his arms crossed, shoulder propped against a pillow. Steve didn’t enter the room. He just stood at the edge of the TV’s light, like Bucky had only a few weeks ago. Sam looked at him and tried to give a small, comforting smile - but he couldn’t be sure it wasn’t just a look of deep pity. He hated himself for that, suddenly. He didn’t want to pity Steve, because he knew Steve couldn’t stand to be pitied. He made his face blank again.

But Steve wasn’t even looking at him. His eyes were fixed glassily on the television screen, watching Alton Brown adjust his glasses as he announced the secret ingredient for the next round.

“Did he eat,” Steve said quietly when the commercial break came.

“Yeah,” said Sam. “Nat took him some food.”

Steve nodded, mechanical and slow. “Tell her thanks,” he said.

“What have you been up to?”

Steve took in a slow breath. “I took a walk,” he said. “Saw a friend.”

“Are you okay?” Sam asked. It wasn’t a question he really needed a detailed answer to — he just wanted some reassurance that Steve wasn’t going off the deep end. Not like Steve would ever admit it if he was.

“Yeah, I’m good,” said Steve with a sigh.

“You’re a terrible liar,” Sam said.

Steve smiled, lips pressed together in a way that pushed his dimples into sharp relief, and yet still somehow managed to be gaunt with grief. He stared a moment longer at a Food Network promo flashing across the screen, then nodded to Sam. He said, “Night,” and disappeared into his room.

Sam didn’t finish the episode.

 

* * *

 

The next few days passed without further incident. Natasha went abroad on Avengers PR business. Steve went for frequent jogs. Bucky stopped watching the news at night. In fact — Bucky disappeared entirely. The only evidence that he was still in the house at all was that the food Sam set out at night would sometimes disappear. Sam had a doctor’s appointment, where he was informed that he was well on his way to being healed, but the stitches weren’t ready to come out yet - and for God’s sake, he shouldn’t be going sprinting around the National Mall before he’d even begun to recover his endurance. So, it was with a now-familiar feeling of reckless frustration that he began daily trips to the gym to begin training again. A bit of lifting, some stretches. Nothing dangerous for his healing process. Well — nothing _too_ dangerous.

He’d also finally gotten tired of sitting endlessly in front of the TV, so he started reading instead. And so it was in the middle of the afternoon a few days later, as he was struggling his way through the _The Fellowship of the Ring_ for the second time in his life, that he heard something rustle in the kitchen. He glanced up, expecting to see that Natasha had somehow returned without making a single sound (which he knew was entirely possible, after an incident involving an only half-closed bathroom door), or that Steve was rooting around for a post-run snack.

But it wasn’t Natasha. It wasn’t Steve, either. It was somebody in a t-shirt and sweats, inspecting a box of cereal.

Sam stared, then blinked, then tried to decide whether or not to act as if he’d noticed. But it was very difficult to look away; there was something completely incongruous and absurd about seeing Bucky looking inside a cereal box. Did this happen all the time? Had Sam just been asleep or gone during these kitchen raids? Somehow, he was still surprised when he found out that super soldiers did normal things like eat or use the bathroom. The last time he’d actually seen Bucky, he’d been ready to split Steve’s skull, and now here he was, pouring cereal into a bowl, grabbing the milk from the fridge, rooting in the drawers for a spoon.

“Farthest on the left,” said Sam. Bucky froze, his head turning fractionally towards Sam, before he reached out one hand - the metal one - and slowly, almost curiously, opened the leftmost drawer. He pulled out a spoon and, equally slowly, began to eat his cereal.

Sam returned to his book. He assumed, with the cereal acquired, Bucky would consider his mission accomplished and retreat to his room. But he only got about a paragraph in before Bucky spoke.

“I’m still waiting on that music,” Bucky said as his spoon made a scraping noise against the bottom of his bowl. His voice was hoarse from disuse.

Sam looked up. Bucky was chewing cereal and watching him. “Music?” he repeated. 

“The _pop culture_ ,” said Bucky, with a sardonic inflection that told Sam he was being quoted. And there was that tiny, grim smile — a smile that might’ve once looked cocky on a dark-haired Sergeant in his pressed new uniform. Sam did his best not to look at it because it made his guts do something weird and complicated that he’d rather not think about. Instead, he put his book on the table.

“Well, okay,” he said, “for one thing, you don’t need to make it sound like an arms deal. And for another…I mean, I thought you were kind of anti- the whole gift thing.”

Bucky stared at Sam, and then looked down into the cereal bowl. He was suddenly very still again. The smile was gone.

Redwing let out a soft scolding noise from his cage in the corner.

“I’ve just started understanding what it is to be hungry,” Bucky said slowly, after a long moment. The words seemed to exit him reluctantly, as though he didn’t yet understand the process by which the thoughts had made their way to his mouth. He almost looked surprised that he’d said anything at all. “I wanted this food. I got it.”

Sam nodded when Bucky’s pause became another long silence. “That’s a big step,” he said.

Sam heard a small huff of breath, like a laugh that had miscarried. Bucky had bent his head, tongue bit between his teeth. He looked up at Sam.

“You know, Steve spent weeks telling me to talk about myself like I was human. And I still don’t know what that means,” Bucky said. Sam had to keep himself from wincing; there was a bite to the way Bucky said _Steve,_ a strained inflection that stood out from his low, calm, half-monotone speech. It was a voice, Sam thought, that could so easily fall back into a drawl _._ “You say this is a big step? But I don’t know what it’s a step towards.” Bucky’s lips thinned in a morbidly amused grimace. “I know where the Grand Canyon is. Isn’t that funny?” Sam didn’t think it was particularly funny, but he didn’t say anything. “It’s in Arizona, thirty-six degrees, six minutes north, a hundred-and-twenty degrees, six minutes west. It’s over a mile deep. One-thousand-eight-hundred kilometers. I know that. Does that mean I want to go there? And if it does, does that mean I’m remembering something? Am I becoming him again? See, I sure as hell don’t know what James Buchanan Barnes wanted, but I doubt it’s the same things I want.”

Sam swallowed. Bucky had said _James Buchanan Barnes_ in the same way he’d said _Steve_ ; dark and sharp, like the words were jagged glass in his mouth. His eyes were feverish now, too. He looked like he would rather be anywhere else in the world than standing in front of Sam clutching a cereal bowl and a spoon. He looked like he wanted a gun, a mask, a way to disappear, to act instead of talk. His arms seemed not to know what to do, with no weapon, no target, no punches to throw as he stood halfway between the kitchen and Sam. But there was nothing to fight, so words were spilling out of him instead.

“Bucky — “ Sam began calmly.

Bucky’s neck convulsed. “Don’t call me that,” he snapped.

“I’m sorry,” said Sam, raising both hands, “I’m sorry, you’re right. It’s okay to not know what you want, though. That’s okay.”

Bucky stared at him, head turned slightly, like he was trying to ascertain if Sam had some agenda. Sam looked right back, keeping his gaze steady. It was an expression he’d perfected after the army, at the VA. It was an expression people could trust. It was what he wore when he had to keep his own feelings out of the way of someone else’s. He wore it a lot around Steve in the weeks and months after S.H.I.E.L.D. went down, when he had to watch Steve constantly out of the corner of his eye, looking for signs, for warnings, for symptoms of the cracks he knew were there, hidden deep under the skin. He was wearing it a lot around Steve now, he realized. Especially after the disaster with the painting.

“I’m not a bomb,” Bucky said tightly. 

Sam frowned. “I know that.”

“Yeah? Then don’t treat me like I’m about to go off.”

Sam realized his hands were still raised in a placating gesture. He lowered them as Bucky glared.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “You’re right. Again.”

Something flickered across Bucky’s face, too quickly for Sam to catch. Then his features became hard and impassive, just as they had earlier as he faced Natasha. 

“Yeah,” Bucky said, “yeah, I always gotta be right, don’t I?”

“What?” said Sam blankly.

“Be nice to the brainwashed killer, or he’ll revert to old programming and snap your neck,” Bucky continued with a bland, heavy-lidded stare, “be nice, don’t yell, or he’ll grind your skull into the pavement — “

“Stop,” said Sam, alarmed. “Jesus, man, you know that’s not what we’re thinking — ”

“Sure,” said Bucky. He continued to stare, expressionless, so that Sam couldn’t tell if this was sarcasm or simply acquiescence. Sam stared uneasily back. He knew, in the back of his mind, the right thing to say - what would come out if Bucky were just another veteran sitting across from him in his office, or standing at the front of the support group. He knew he should say something like, _you’re not a bomb you’re a human being who has been to hell and back and we want you to feel safe,_ but the words seemed remote and cold as they settled on his tongue. He couldn’t say them. Instead he found himself looking back at two blue eyes and wishing they weren’t blank, wishing they didn’t look as though they were behind a black muzzle, wishing they were bright and angry and laughing and grieving and anything but what they were now. Something hot and many-fingered gripped at his stomach.

“Okay,” Sam said. “You don’t want nice? I can do that.”

Bucky blinked.

“I can tell you that if I see you treat Steve like that ever again, I’ll have a gun to your head faster than your supersoldier bullshit can comprehend,” Sam said, and the many-fingered thing twisted as Bucky blinked again. “You don’t get to beat him up for trying to help. Steve’s my friend, and I can’t let you treat him like that. Got it?”

Something in Bucky’s face slackened, and suddenly, he didn’t look angry or dangerous or murderous or even blank. He looked miserable. Sam swallowed thickly as Bucky turned and put the cereal bowl in the sink. Slow, silent. Not even the china made a noise against the metal basin. He didn’t look at Sam as he walked back towards the hall. A few seconds later, a door closed quietly out of sight.

Sam let out a slow breath and picked up his book again. He felt sick. He’d made Bucky walk out on him. He’d _threatened_ him. There was a right way to tell someone that their behavior was unacceptable, and there was a wrong way - and not only had he done the wrong way, he’d essentially stabbed himself in the face with a wrong-way cactus.

But then again, he thought with a sick lurch of self-loathing, wasn’t that what he’d wanted? To see some emotion on Bucky’s face, to reveal something beneath that blank stare? Well. He’d gotten that. And he’d almost certainly ensured Bucky would never talk to him again into the bargain.

Sam settled himself back onto the couch and stared down at chapter nine of _The Fellowship of the Ring,_ but it was a very long time before anything on the page began to make sense.

 


	4. four

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Natasha.”
> 
> She paused, head turned in profile to glance back. The midmorning light cast navy shadows over her face.
> 
> “This is personal for all of us,” he said.
> 
> Her eyes glinted.
> 
> “Even for you?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's here. Chapter four is here. I can't believe I've been sitting on this damn thing a year (that rhymed). I can't even describe how grateful I am for the (to me, inexplicable) outpouring of support you guys have given me. I cherish each and every comment I get. Thank you all so much for still reading this ridiculous fic that was only meant to be two chapters — and I haven't even gotten to the mixtapes yet. What's that all about. Come on, get it together. Give the people their damn mixtapes.
> 
> Thanks as always to my jewel, my diamond, my gem, my Lenka. And also to Lindsey, who despises Marvel, but reads this because she loves me. For some weird reason. Thanks also to Catt and Asher, who are my buds and also make wonderful art of this pairing (you can find them at namorish.tumblr.com and doomburgerdoodles.tumblr.com).

Sam couldn’t sleep.

This was not a new phenomenon, exactly — it just hadn’t happened in a while. There were entire weeks after he came home from deployment when he’d only gotten an hour or two each night, either because he was awoken by nightmares, or he was too afraid to even let himself drift off. But the intervening years had dulled the sharp anxiety of his dreams, and more recently, his injury had made him too exhausted to worry before his head hit the pillow. But sleeplessness was not a stranger to Sam.

By three A.M. he’d given up on keeping his eyes closed. By four, he was staring at the wall as he lay on his side, eyes endlessly tracing the pattern of the wallpaper. At five-fifteen, he got up. He changed in the dark, the streetlamp filtering dusty and yellow through the blinds onto the grey monochrome of his room. He shoved a water bottle and some protein bars into his backpack, and left the house.

The streets were by no means deserted, even at this hour, but the people that passed him walked quickly and quietly because they were the folks who had no choice except to be up at 5:30 in the morning. A young homeless couple gathered up the blankets from their makeshift bed as he walked by, and an ambulance and several police cars careened down the street while taxis pulled to the side of the road, their drivers sipping morosely at cups of Dunkin Donuts coffee. Men and women walked with briefcases or drove long black cars down a street that was still a deep grey shot with the yellow of streetlamps.

In contrast, the white fluorescence of the gym lobby made Sam’s eyes ache as he hefted his backpack and headed straight for a treadmill near the far wall. He wove around the other patrons, avoiding eye contact on the off chance that somebody recognized him (a rare occurrence, but at the moment the last thing he wanted to do was smile and sign one of his own bad doodles of a falcon for somebody’s niece). He barely even glanced up until he was halfway across the gym floor, and when he did, he saw red. Red hair, to be exact.

“You come here often?”

Natasha pulled a stray hair out of her mouth and frowned as he stood at the edge of the row of hanging punching bags.

“I could make a joke about early birds,” she said, surveying him, “but you really don’t look up for it.”

“Thanks,” said Sam, running a hand over the rough stubble on his cheek.

“Rough night?”

Sam shrugged. “Couldn’t sleep. It happens.”

The way Natasha’s lips pursed as she readjusted the tape around her hands told him she guessed it wasn’t just a bad night’s sleep that had lured Sam out of the house before dawn. But he wasn’t about to tell her about his argument with Bucky. If you could call it that.

“I’m assuming the PR trip didn’t go so well,” he said instead, pushing lightly at one of the black vinyl punching bags.

“Why would you think that?”

“Uh…it’s six A.M. and you’re in a gym beating the shit out of a punching bag instead of sleeping?”

Natasha looked at him like he was the dweeby hanger-on in a popular clique. “Jetlag is a thing that exists.”

“ _Whoa_ ,” said Sam in mock awe, “you get _jetlag?_ Holy shit, notify the press. A superhero with a flaw.”

She rolled her eyes and landed a few hits on the bag. Sam stood back to watch her. Every part of her body was a tightly-coiled spring; she was all muscle, though she didn’t look it. He kept trying to identify the exact moment of her wind-up, but she seemed to hit out of nowhere, smooth and whip-fast. The speed of her assault increased, until she was a blur of grey and red, and Sam could smell her deodorant. With a final grunt, she gave a forceful kick that sent the bag flying nearly a hundred-and-eighty degrees upward, until the top caught against the overhanging metal and it dropped back down with a loud rattling of chains and an ominous wobbling sound from the stand.

“Yeah,” said Sam, catching hold of the bag as Natasha rolled her shoulders and shook back her hair, “that’s totally normal for a person with jetlag.”

“I thought I was a superhero,” said Natasha dryly. “Make up your mind.”

“What’s your secret? Do you pretend the bag is somebody you don’t like?”

She gave him a sly look. “If there was someone out there that I disliked _that much_ , do you think I’d be here taking it out on the bag?”

Sam considered this. “Okay, fair. But seriously, though,” he said, “are you okay?”

Natasha snorted and dragged a hair-tie from around her wrist to pull back her hair. “You should know by now that’s the worst possible way to actually get me to tell you how I feel.”

“Sorry,” said Sam, “but I don’t really do the whole subtle manipulation thing where people’s feelings are concerned.”

Natasha’s eyes flicked up to meet his, sharp and unflinching. Her face and chest were shining with a faint layer of sweat, though she barely seemed winded. Her hands dropped to her hips. The look on her face was the one she got when she was calculating the risk of a situation: intensely focused, and just a little curious.

“Stark loves to send me on these PR trips because he thinks it’s funny,” she said finally, beginning to peel the tape from her hands. “Public relations…isn’t my favorite thing,” she said delicately, then shrugged one shoulder. “I made this choice. I can handle it.”

Sam nodded. “‘Course you can.”

Natasha finished unwrapping her fingers and hoisted her duffel onto her shoulder. Then suddenly her arm was looped around Sam’s, dragging him down the aisle of punching bags.

“We’re getting coffee,” she said.

“Whoa, no,” protested Sam, “I haven’t even worked out yet — ”

“You can go another day without trying to tear out those stitches,” she said as they wound through the forest of treadmills and exercise bikes.

“They’re almost healed!” But try as he might, there was no way to disentangle his arm from hers. And so it was that Sam found himself sitting in on a park bench beside Natasha, nursing a misto that was too hot to drink, and resolutely trying not to feel guilty for having bought himself a chocolate croissant as well.

Sitting on their half-shaded bench, they were the only ones lingering at this early hour. Nannies with strollers, kids on the way to school, and business men shout-talking into their phones all gave them little heed as they walked briskly past.

Sam watched a kid dressed in a badly-fitting suit jacket practically hopping across the wet grass that was soaking his nice shoes in a shortcut gone wrong. He finally put on a burst of speed and high-stepped it to the pavement, only to spatter his khakis with mud. The kid let out a single shouted, “Fuck!” that was met with an exclamation of disgust from a passing woman clutching the hand of a toddler.

Sam snorted into his coffee, inhaled a boiling mouthful, and promptly spat it back onto his shirt. He let out a stream of expletives as he tried to sop up the coffee using the napkin that came with his pastry. If the woman with the toddler had still been within earshot, she would have slapped him.

When he looked up, Natasha was watching him — not in the razor sharp way she usually did, but more like she was enjoying the sight of him making a fool of himself. The corner of her lip was even curled up in a tiny smile.

“Shut up,” he said.

Natasha made a sound deep in her throat that he thought was a laugh, and took a sip of her own coffee. Sam chewed on his burnt tongue for a moment.

“Can I ask you a question?”

Natasha raised an unimpressed eyebrow. “I don’t know, can you?”

It was such a Nick Fury-like expression that Sam immediately clamped his mouth shut for several seconds until she lowered her cup and assumed a more neutral look that didn’t make his ass cheeks clench. Once he was sure she had not just metamorphosed into a sixty-year-old black man, he asked, “Why does Clint call you guys crazy?”

If he was perfectly honest, this question had been sitting coldly in his stomach for several days now, but there hadn’t been a moment that seemed appropriate to bring it up.

Natasha didn’t reply immediately, taking a ponderous sip of coffee the same way other people might take a deep drag of a cigarette. “It helps give him distance,” she said after a moment. “And also because he’s a confrontational asshole who loves to pick the most provocative word he can.”

“Okay, but - you do realize _crazy_ might not be the right word,” Sam said.

“You think I don’t know that?”

“Does he?”

“It’s his way of saying we’re fucked up,” she said, her voice hard. “There’s no easy way to say we’ve had gods and scientists reach inside our brains and undo everything that makes us ourselves. So…he calls it crazy.”

Sam carefully lifted off the lid of his coffee to let it cool, and let one finger hover over the rising steam. His skin was damp when he rubbed it against his thumb. “And what do you call it?”

Natasha paused. Her hands were resting open on her lap either side of her cup, fingertips just barely supporting it. She looked down at her own prone palms and curled fingers.

“The truth,” she said quietly. “We were all victims of people who believed they could make human beings into weapons.”

“Clint said he needs to level out,” Sam said. He didn’t need to explain who “ _he”_ was.

Something caught in Natasha’s expression before she smoothed it again into perfect wry solemnity. “Clint says a lot of things,” she said.

“But he’s right.”

“Yes, he is,” she said. The way she sighed around the words was almost tender.

A crowd passed by at that moment, a stampede of toddlers in tiny plaid uniforms, shepherded by teachers holding large yellow flags, straining to make themselves heard over childish voices. One of the kids, two fingers of one hand drooping from her mouth while the other clutched a teacher’s hand, held Sam’s eye as she passed, neck craning to watch him, until her chaperone tugged her arm to stop her lagging. Sam smiled encouragingly — but she had already turned away.

He took in a deep breath of cold, leaf-rot park air. Across the street, the early morning sun lit the windows so they looked like they’d been papered in gold leaf.

“Nat,” Sam said. “Why are you living with us?”

Natasha reached over and took his misto with one hand, and took a noisy slurp. Sam stared, slightly in awe of her apparent immunity to scalding liquids.

“I don’t live with you,” she said, and took another sip.

“C’mon, you sort of do.”

She shrugged and handed his drink back, wiping her lips with the back of her hand. Sam tilted his head towards her, eyes lazily focused on the tiny grain on the fabric of her sweatpants running parallel over her knee.

“Thing is,” he said, “you couldn’t get out fast enough after S.H.I.E.L.D. went down. You barely stopped by to give Steve those files. But — then you came back.”

A man on a cellphone passed by, one hand shading his eyes against the bright morning sun. As the man’s shadow passed, one side of Natasha’s hair became a sunlit, golden-red halo.

“Why did you come back, Tasha?” Sam said.

Natasha offered him her coffee cup with a secret smile.

“Trust has never been my strong suit,” she said. “I guess it was time for some self-improvement.”

Sam took a sip of her coffee and smiled back.

 

* * *

 

“That coffee was not even warm,” Natasha said when they were a yard from the front steps of their house. “You’re a baby.”

“No, I am a grown man and that drink was too damn hot,” Sam said as he jammed the key in the door. “It’s not my fault that vodka has ruined your taste buds.”

“Taste buds have nothing to do with — “ was all Natasha managed to say before the door swung open and they came face to face with a thunderous-looking Steve.

“Hey,” said Natasha nonchalantly, but Sam suddenly felt a tenseness in her, like a low bass hum.

“Sit down,” Steve said. The lines of his face were hard.

Sam raised his eyebrows, but obeyed, and followed Natasha into the living room. He sat next to her, feeling oddly like a teenager being reprimanded by a parent. Steve had somehow even perfected the stern, disappointed silence. He stood in front of them, hands on his hips, jaw clenched.

“So was anybody going to tell me?” he said. A vein pulsed in his forehead. Sam had never been on the receiving end of the particular look Steve was giving them now — simultaneously flinty and burning — and it was an altogether uncomfortable experience. He felt like he’d done something Very Disappointing.

Sam asked, “Tell you what?”

“Tell me you traced a Doombot to the Red Room,” said Steve. “And that that technology is potentially being used again?” Sam could tell it was costing Steve every ounce of control not to yell, but somehow this restraint felt more terrifying than any amount of yelling.

“Steve,” said Natasha in a low voice, “I know what you’re thinking, but — “

“ _But_ the process was the same, wasn’t it?” said Steve, a note of desperation in his voice that was nearing a crack. There was something that was going unsaid here, some vital piece of information that Sam didn’t have, but he couldn’t seem to bring himself to interrupt, despite his confusion. “They wiped — they would wipe them, then put something else in, right? How do you know Doom isn’t being paid to develop it — “

“Doom wouldn’t work with them — “

“But you don’t _know_ that!” Steve shouted. He immediately winced at the loudness of his own voice, and scrubbed his hands through his hair. “Just — Jesus, I’m not stupid. I do notice when an Avenger borrows a jet to take a day-long vacation to Russia, I mean — he filed a goddamn expense report!”

“Look, I’m sorry,” Sam said finally, “but I’m totally lost.”

Two heads whipped around to look at him, but neither spoke. Sam had the uncomfortable feeling that they’d either forgotten he was there, or had just assumed he was on the same wavelength. Hopefully it was the latter. “Steve, man…I can’t read your mind like Ms. Superspy here, so you gotta tell me what’s going on.”

Steve just looked at Sam, his mouth hanging slightly open. It was as though he had just been sprinting towards a cataclysmic, terrifying conclusion, and this sudden request to backtrack and explain seemed to derail him completely. Just as Steve seemed to be gathering himself to speak, however, Natasha answered for him:

“Steve thinks the Doombot Clint chased was collecting information for Hydra, and Doom is being paid to recreate the technology that let them program Bucky. He thinks they want him back.”

“Oh,” said Sam.

His chest felt suddenly tight, like he’d waded into freezing water. If Steve had actually said those words, he would have felt the compulsion to argue, to reassure him, but somehow coming from Natasha — even with the dry note of skepticism in her voice — it felt much more like something that could very well be a reality.

“So you’ve considered it as a possibility, too,” Steve said to Natasha. He looked relieved to jump to this new line of reasoning.

“Yeah, I don’t know if you picked up on this, but I’m kind of trained to consider every potential scenario,” Natasha said icily. “It doesn’t mean I think it’s likely.”

“Where is Bucky?” said Sam quickly, as Steve bristled.

“He’s in his room,” Steve said after a moment, his eyes flicking back to Sam. He was standing extraordinarily still, as though the nervous energy he might be expending by pacing or wringing his hands had instead frozen him in place. “I’ve been checking on him.”

“Bet he loves that,” Natasha said. Steve turned on her.

“What do you want me to do?” he said. “Turn him loose on the streets?”

“You know that’s not what I meant,” Natasha said, her eyes narrowed. She was wound tight like a spring beside Sam, and Steve’s increasing agitation was not helping matters.

“Well, nothing’s happened yet,” said Sam. It was a very feeble attempt to pacify Steve, and they all knew it, and as such it received no acknowledgement. Natasha was giving Steve one of her stares. Sam was oddly relieved to see that he was not the only recipient of that look. To his credit, Steve was returning her gaze with surprising steadiness.

“You do know that if this _is_ Hydra, and they do want him back,” Natasha said quietly, “then nowhere may be safe.”

“I know,” Steve said. He suddenly looked bone-tired and miserable, which was an even worse sight than when he had been standing stiff and lock-jawed only moments before. The mask that he usually wore had fallen away as they spoke about Bucky. And at the moment he wasn’t doing anything to put it back up. Sam wondered if he should avert his eyes. Steve was always so careful not to bleed on other people, and this weary, grieving man standing before them now seemed somehow indecent. Naked. “But he might as well stay here for now where we can keep an eye on him,” Steve continued. “Natasha, will you talk to Fury? See if he can work on finding a safer location.”

“Sure.”

Steve rubbed his neck. He seemed exhausted, but just like that, the mask was back in place. He looked once again like the Steve who could be relied on to chide Natasha for doodling on his notes, and in the same meeting sketch Sam’s profile on his folder next to last week’s faded lines describing the sweep of Natasha’s hair or Sharon’s jaw. “I’m going to check on him.”

“Good luck,” Sam said as Steve passed. He had a feeling that Bucky’s usual less-than-charitable feelings would be amplified a hundredfold by this new paranoia on Steve’s part.

But was Steve really paranoid? Was it really so unreasonable that Hydra would be wanting their main weapon back? Except — there was no evidence that it _was_ Hydra. All they had to go on was a mysterious Doombot signature and a bunch of dusty, untouched equipment in Russia.

As Steve disappeared down the hall, Natasha let her head fall back with sigh. “ _Clint,_ ” she groaned.

“He probably had to file the expense report,” Sam said.

“Of course he did,” Natasha snapped. “But that doesn’t explain how Steve found out the details. Expense reports are food and gas, not confidential intel.”

“Maybe Steve bribed him with coffee,” Sam said. He was only half joking.

Natasha shot him a sharp, dangerous look. “Clint wouldn’t tell him,” she said with finality. She reached back to massage her shoulder with one hand, grimacing. “I knew Steve would react like this. I wanted to investigate first.”

“You were just abroad, couldn’t you have done it then?”

“Stark had me booked at press conferences and parties all week,” she said darkly. “I couldn’t get away.”

“That’s a rough life,” Sam said.

Natasha dignified this only with a supremely unamused glare, still massaging her neck and shoulders. She stood, and Sam followed her as she walked to the kitchen and opened the fridge.

“I got a question, though. You said Doom wouldn’t work with Hydra,” Sam said. “But I thought bad guys loved to team up.”

“Victor Von Doom is Latverian Romani, Hydra was founded by Nazis, you do the math,” Natasha said, continuing to stare into the fridge. “But it’s possible Doom doesn’t know they’re Hydra, especially if they’re ex-S.H.I.E.L.D. agents who know how to fool his background checks. They could be pretending they’re from A.I.M. or some other organization.”

“I thought you didn’t agree with Steve.”

Natasha only raised an eyebrow. This was an expression that could mean any number of things when Natasha wore it, but at the moment it clearly said he was one comment away from being concussed _._

Sam sighed. He pressed his fingers into his eyes until he saw stars, and dragged his palms down his stubbled jaw. “Okay, it could be Hydra. But it could also be just Doom. Or it could be Doom working for someone other than Hydra.”

Natasha said, “Try telling that to Steve.” She pulled out a tupperware of leftovers and began to eat straight from the container. Sam wrinkled his nose.

“Carbonara’s no good cold,” he pointed out.

“Microwaves ruin cream-based sauces,” Natasha said thickly through a mouth full of pasta.

 Sam shook his head. “Whatever. So what _do_ you think is going on?”

Natasha swallowed, then took another enormous bite, and swallowed that, too. And another, and another.

The carbonara was almost all gone before she finally answered.

“I think that the Red Room’s technology should have been destroyed a long time ago,” she said in a very even and measured tone, which meant that this was the mild version of what she wanted to say. She placed the dish in the sink. “And I should have made it my business to wipe every blueprint and file from the earth before it could be used on anyone again.”

“That goes in the dishwasher, by the way,” Sam said, pointing at the dish.

Natasha looked at him and turned on the faucet until the bowl overflowed with dirty pasta water.

“Close enough,” she said.

She slipped around the table past him and through the cutout door, suddenly ghost-like in the blue, unlit hallway.

“Natasha,” Sam said.

She paused, head turned in profile to glance back. The midmorning light cast navy shadows over her face.

“This is personal for all of us,” he said.

Her eyes glinted.

“Even for you?” she said.

Sam didn’t answer, but that many-fingered thing squeezed at his stomach again.

“Somebody wants that technology,” he said, ignoring this. “Doom or A.I.M. or Hydra or that Loki dude. And I don’t think it even matters _what_ they’re trying to do with it. Like you said…that tech should have died a long time ago. So what do you say we make it our business to blow whoever this is to kingdom come before they can hurt anybody else?”

He wasn’t sure, but he thought she smiled.

 

* * *

 

Two hours later, Natasha and Steve left again — this time for Los Angeles, the land of beaches and celebrities and, it turned out, mutant reptile gangs terrorizing the locals. Once again, Sam was treated to a good-bye phone call from Natasha on the way to the airfield, and once again, he was benched for an important mission without prior consultation. An acid burn sizzled in the pit of his stomach as he lay in bed that night, and he knew it wasn’t his side acting up. He was going to the gym tomorrow, he decided. There was no one there to stop him. There would be no one to monitor him. If the stitches came out, then they came out, good riddance, he thought angrily, and turned himself over to dreams in which Riley fell and fell and fell and fell and fell…

 

* * *

 

The next morning found Sam bundled into a coat and scarf and wishing he’d brought a hat as well, because October seemed to have decided to give them windchill several weeks early. The gym somehow managed to be both freezing in temperature and humid with sweat, and the changing room was, if possible, worse: someone had cranked a window open, rendering the opaque tempered glass completely useless to anyone who might have wanted privacy from the street outside. This, combined with the pervading scent of Axe, made Sam change at lightning speed for fear that someone might stick their head in the window to see his goosepimpled ass.

Once changed, he ignored his instinct to go straight for the weights in an attempt to rebuild several pounds of lost muscle, and settled himself onto a cycle. A night’s sleep had tempered the frustration of the previous evening, and the best thing to do now would be to work on his endurance, he told himself as he began to spin the pedals. He tried to ignore the voice in his head that said he would be useless anyways until he could regain his abdominal strength, which was essential for steering his suit and maneuvering with weapons during flight. And which would be impossible until his side was fully healed. He gritted his teeth and looked up at the TV. The subtitles were several seconds behind, still spasmodically detailing a lawsuit while the footage had moved on to bombings in Gaza.

Try as he might to focus on the screen, however, the image of Steve in the living room, immobile with anxiety, sure without a doubt that someone was trying to take Bucky from him again, kept surfacing in his mind. If he were in Steve’s place, Sam thought, he wasn’t sure that was a trauma he would be able to survive. To lose someone, then to find them again under such duress, only to lose them once again…Sam shuddered and pedaled faster.

The question of how best to foil Steve’s hypothetical Hydra agents in his current injured state occupied Sam’s thoughts for the rest of his workout, and then well after he’d changed and left the gym, feeling tired, but definitely more at peace with the world. He set off down the street, duffel bag in hand, and had just begun to contemplate asking Natasha for a set of those little electrified disks — when he saw a baseball cap and square-set shoulders.

Bucky was about fifty yards down the sidewalk. Sam’s view was partially obscured by other people, but there was no mistaking those watchful eyes and unkempt hair.Bucky was walking towards him, gaze resting well beyond Sam, even though it was impossible that he hadn’t already spotted him. Bucky was too good of a soldier for that.

Sam kept walking, despite the jolt in his chest that almost made him stop. What would happen when they met somewhere between the flower planter and the bike rack up ahead? Would Bucky ignore him, as happened so often at home? Would he stop for awkward conversation? Sam felt sudden terror as he remembered the last time they’d spoken. _I’ll have a gun to your head faster than your supersoldier bullshit can comprehend._ It had been a pointless threat; both of them knew Bucky could disembowel him quicker and easier than squashing a fly, even if Sam was the one holding the gun. What he’d really meant was that if Bucky continued to hurt Steve then he would no longer have a place in their home. But this knowledge did nothing to rid him of the hot weight of shame in his gut. If one of his cases at the VA had told him somebody said that to them, he’d be in the process of helping them sever ties completely. What had possessed him to say something like that?

Bucky was still walking towards him. The space between them became smaller and smaller, until they were only two yards apart. Then Bucky raised his head to look Sam straight in the eye. The sun flooded his face without the cap’s shade, and the blue of his eyes became translucent grey in the sunlight.

“Hey,” Sam said. His voice sounded tinny and overly cheery to his own ears.

“Hi,” said Bucky.

They had both stopped in the middle of the sidewalk. Bucky looked odd surrounded by decorated storefronts and the soft blue shadows from the trees that lined the street. Like something patched and mended and not quite ready to venture under the sun.

“How are you?” Sam asked.

“Fine,” said Bucky. It was a bland word and a bland tone of voice, and conveyed absolutely no meaning. His gaze was surprisingly steady.

“Good,” said Sam, bouncing his head in a gesture approaching a nod. He felt horrendously awkward.

Bucky seemed to realize that he’d brought the conversation to a standstill, because he added, “I was taking a walk.”

“That’s nice,” Sam said. He squinted around at the street. “Uh…there’s a coffee place around the corner. You wanna sit down?”

“I’d rather walk,” Bucky said.

“Oh. Okay,” Sam said. “Which way?”

They ended up back where Sam had just come from, since Bucky’s general momentum seemed to be taking him in that direction. Sam wouldn’t have been surprised to look into a window as they walked along, and see his own face reflected with an expression akin to a recently stunned fish. He had only offered to get coffee out of some pathetic attempt at courtesy, fully expecting to be turned down (and rightly so, he told himself). And yet here was he was, walking beside a man he’d threatened less than twenty-four hours ago. This was beyond awkward now. This was painful.

Bucky, meanwhile, walked silently and slowly, and all the while his eyes skittered about the world from beneath his baseball cap. Sam could practically see him tensing every time someone walked past. They passed the door to the gym, and Sam stopped.

“Hey,” he said. “You look like you could do to let off some steam.”

Bucky looked at him.

“Come on,” Sam said.

Bucky followed him into the lobby, a sleek, muted green antechamber to the cavernous room beyond. It smelled even sweatier than it had twenty minutes ago when he’d left. Loud grunts and shouts from within told him that the morning kickboxing class must be in session.

“Hi there,” he said to the girl at the desk, “I’d like a guest pass for my friend here.”

The desk girl raised a heavily-penciled eyebrow. “Welcome back,” she said to Sam, pulling a keycard from a drawer and swiping it through a scanner. Her eyes wandered as she did so from Sam to Bucky, and rested there for much longer than was really polite. Sam wasn’t sure if this was because she liked what she saw, or if she was wondering if she’d seen him on the FBI’s Most Wanted. Bucky returned her stare impassively, but, from the corner of his eye, Sam saw him tug at his jacket cuff with the gloved fingers of his left hand.

“That’ll be twenty-two dollars,” the desk girl said, pointing her eyebrows at Sam again.

Sam exhaled and reached for his wallet. “Oh boy,” he muttered as he fumbled with his credit card, “there goes my coffee money.”

“Then let’s go somewhere else,” Bucky said.

There was an odd tightness to his voice, but Sam just shook his head, reflexively embarrassed that Bucky had actually replied to what he’d considered a private complaint to his wallet. “No, no, it’s fine,” he began, then stopped as he actually turned to look. Bucky’s shoulders were hunched forward — not shyly, or turtle-like, but like a hound tensing, lowering its head and shoring up for an attack. The sounds of the kickboxing class echoed louder in the foyer, and something in Bucky buzzed, hummed, shrank to a concentrated stillpoint, a moment of survival viewed through a scope. From here, the guttural yells and shouts sounded just enough like a battle.

Sam pocketed his wallet. “On second thought, no thanks,” he said to the desk girl. She raised the other eyebrow, but said nothing as they left.

Once outside, he led Bucky straight to the park he and Natasha had visited the day before. He walked ahead, but kept Bucky just within eyesight, a black specter hovering at the edge of his vision. He was glad to find that the park was empty, except for a few children on the playground. He led Bucky into the middle of the large grassy area that had ruined the kid in the jacket’s khakis, inwardly relieved that it was completely dry this time. What he was about to do might be a little nutty, but he was glad he might at least get out of it without it turning into mud wrestling. He stopped and turned to face Bucky, who just stared at him out from under the hat. He seemed genuinely confused, and wary as a result.

“You okay?” Sam asked.

Bucky gave an annoyed sort of twitch and grunted.

“Okay,” Sam said. “I just thought —” he stepped back and gestured to the open field around them, “ — this might be a better place than the gym to let off steam.”

“Let off steam,” Bucky echoed. He watched curiously as Sam peeled off his sweatshirt and tossed it a few feet away. Sam pulled his shirt back down from where it had climbed up his stomach and exhaled in a rush, shaking out his hands. The cold breeze immediately covered his forearms in gooseflesh. The expression on Bucky’s face was almost amused.

“Sparring,” Sam said. “It’ll help you get out of your head for a bit. I don’t know how you’ve kept all that muscle without exercising — and I’m honestly kind of annoyed, because that’s not fair, you’re like a goddamn brick house, man, how do you _do_ that? But, anyway — I guarantee, even super soldiers need to keep in shape. And since neither of us has much to do these days, seems to me like the best option.”

Bucky considered him for a moment, eyes lingering on the thin strip of woefully unmuscled brown abdomen peeking out from beneath Sam’s shirt. If he were Natasha, Sam knew, there would be a snort of derision coming very soon. He was fully resigned to the fact that he was in no shape to be sparring with anyone, let alone a skilled and deadly assassin-slash-genetically enhanced super soldier with a metal arm. This might be a bloodbath ending with him immobile on the grass, or worse, but he didn’t care. The reckless frustration from the night before was back, and honestly — all he wanted to do was prove to himself that he could still throw a punch.

And, to his surprise, Bucky stepped back a pace, tilting his head as though assessing him. Then Bucky took off the hat and threw it next to Sam’s jacket. He tensed into a ready position. His gloved hand flexed.

“And hey,” Sam added, “beating me up might even make you feel better.”

“I dunno,” Bucky said (and there was that almost-lazy smile again). “Not sure I could take on a giant bird.”

In the split second that it took Sam to realize that Bucky had just made a _joke —_ albeit a terrible one — Bucky had already struck. Sam dodged too late, and stumbled backward as Bucky landed a foot squarely in the middle of his chest. Sam didn’t even take the time to think that if this were a real fight, his back would have hit the trees ten yards away, but instead retaliated with a kick of his own as Bucky ricocheted back up with a handspring that would grossly show-offish on literally anyone else. Bucky dodged him easily, and landed two light punches before Sam blocked a third and snuck in an uppercut that was slightly harder than he’d intended. Bucky didn’t seem phased, though; he kept close, closer than Sam was used to in a fight, and landed hit after hit, practically pushing Sam into position for each punch with the previous one, and moving along with him with little sense of self-preservation. Far from being discouraged, however, Sam was thrilled. He had never fought someone this fast — even Steve slowed himself to spar with Sam, but Bucky held nothing back. Sam laughed raggedly as he managed to block another punch and return one of his own. His lungs felt like they might burst, but he didn’t care; he hadn’t felt this good in weeks. Bucky paused and stepped back, looking at him warily.

“Why are you laughing?” Bucky asked. He was flexing his left hand again; the black glove had begun to split at the seams. He wasn’t even out of breath, while Sam only let out another feeble laugh, holding his knees. 

“Nothing,” Sam said, “nothing, man…I’m just…this feels great. You’re fucking brutal, I love it. Hey,” he said, nodding at the glove, “why don’t you take that off?”

Bucky didn’t reply. He just stared at the glove, moving his fingers and watching the torn seams open and close. Tiny flashes of silver winked as the sun caught the metal beneath.

“It’s okay,” Sam said quietly. “Nobody’s around.”

Bucky darted a glance around the park to confirm this for himself — it was indeed empty. Then, carefully, he pulled off the glove. The metal hand beneath was brushed smooth, except for the grooves between the plates that formed his impossible skin. Bucky looked around the trees once more, and then moved in close again. In the second before they began to fight, Sam heard a single, shivering breath.

 

* * *

  

“That’s incredible. You never hit my side once.” For the first time in weeks, his injury was the only part of Sam that _wasn’t_ sore. It was a miracle that he hadn’t torn out any of the stitches, he thought, massaging a tired shoulder. Actually, he was feeling very smug about it, and very vindicated that he’d proven Natasha wrong.

“Didn’t aim for it,” Bucky said, inspecting his torn glove. He frowned down at it, then stuffed it in his pocket. 

“Yep,” Sam said. “That would do it.”

Sparring with the glove off made little difference in Bucky’s fighting, except that every touch he landed with that hand was ice cold against Sam’s sweating body, as the metal was the same temperature as the cold air around them. Sam wondered if Bucky could feel the difference in temperature in his body; he still hadn’t asked what exactly he could feel with the arm.

Bucky picked up his cap and followed Sam back towards the street, settling it carelessly back over his nest of hair.

“Hey, I was wondering,” Sam said as they rejoined the sidewalk, “Natasha was saying something to you…when you, uh…”

“When I hit Steve,” Bucky said flatly. Sam glanced at him. His face was completely expressionless. Sam swallowed.

“Yeah,” he said, and ventured, “What was the word she kept repeating? In Russian? It seemed to…really mean something. To you. If that’s okay to ask.”

Bucky didn’t respond until a several people had passed them. He eyed them suspiciously as they walked by, then he shoved his hands in his pockets — a surprisingly normal gesture Sam hadn’t seen him do before.

“ _Yakov,”_ Bucky said, his voice suddenly transformed into deep, perfectly-accented Russian. “It’s the Russian version of James.”

“Oh,” said Sam. They kept walking. There wasn’t glass in his voice when he said _James._ Not like there was for _Bucky._ “So,” Sam said, a few minutes later, “do you like the name James?”

Bucky shrugged. It was the same annoyed shoulder twitch he’d made when Sam had asked if he was okay. “I don’t know,” he said.

“Well, you don’t like…the other one,” Sam said. “So, what can I call you?”

Bucky looked at him. Then he looked at the sidewalk.

“Barnes,” he said. “Call me Barnes.”

 


	5. five

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> And so Sam found himself sitting on the front stoop with Bucky, shivering in the chill air in his pajamas. He shut his eyes again, the image of Bucky cooly lighting a cigarette burned into his retinas. A really dumb weakness, he thought — guys who looked cool when they smoked. He heard Bucky exhale and smelled tobacco and tar as the wind drifted his way.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't really have words for the support this fic has been shown. Your comments are so wonderful, and I cherish every single one I get. This chapter — and the mixtape within — has been a long time coming. Thanks for everything. As always, thanks to Lenka for letting me bounce ideas off her, and especially thanks to Micaela for providing the Jewish know-how and brilliant characterization. This chapter is her brainchild, too.

“Barnes,” Sam repeated slowly. “I like it. It suits you.”

Bucky gave a strange, quizzical nod, as though processing the idea that there was something about him that a name could suit.

Being a human, Sam thought, being a _person_ , was a strange business.

They walked in silence back to the apartment, but it was a different silence than before. Sam couldn’t quite put his finger on it — perhaps he was more energized, or Bucky was less skittish, or the entire situation was less awkward, or a combination of the three — but Sam felt a quiet, amicable hum in that silence. The knowledge that they now shared an experience that nobody else had. Sam and Bucky sparring in a park. Sam and Bucky walking through a shaded street as though they weren’t societal anomalies, _superheroes_ or _supersoldiers,_ but rather just two people sharing a morning. Sam and Bucky actually getting along, as though Bucky hadn’t tried to use Sam as a human piñata on several occasions. Sam and Bucky. Bucky and Sam.

 _Oh, fuck_ , thought Sam.

 

* * *

 

It took several moments for Sam to remember that Natasha and Steve were gone. The house was entirely too quiet, except for the soft rustling coming from Redwing’s cage.

“Why do you even have a bird?” said Bucky. Sam looked at him. “Nothing against it. Nice bird,” he added quickly. “Just…why?”

Sam shrugged. He opened Redwing’s cage and pulled out the water bottle. “I dunno,” he said, stepping over to the kitchen sink. “Guess he keeps me sane. It’s kind of grounding, having something else to care for, y’know?” He filled the water bottle and replaced it in the cage, smiling as he watched the little bird hop over to drink.

“What if something happens to you,” said Bucky. “Who takes care of it?”

“Hopefully you,” said Sam. Bucky blinked. “Or — Steve and Natasha. Otherwise the little guy’s screwed.” He tried to crack a smile, but something hot was creeping up his neck. He felt like they’d just been sparring again. Sam turned back to the cage and adjusted the water bottle from outside the bars. When he turned around (after taking painstaking effort to level out the bottle just perfectly), Bucky was still watching Redwing clean his feathers.

“Uh,” Sam said. “So. What are you doing the rest of the day?”

Bucky shrugged. “Cutting up papers like a maniac. Sleeping if I feel like it…What?”

“Nothing,” said Sam.

“You made a face.”

“No — no, that was a — very interested face.”

“Bullshit.” There was a ghost of a smile on Bucky’s lips.

“Okay,” Sam sighed, “I’m just saying, I tried to be supportive — “

“What, so you think my plans sound boring?” The smile-ghost had grown into a smirk.

“I mean, If I’m honest —“

“Please.”

“Sounds like the most boring shit since I tried philosophy in college.”

“Oof.” Bucky blew out a disappointed mouthful of air. “Damn. So what, you got a better idea? You gonna take me to a coffee shop?”

Sam raised an eyebrow. “If you insist. Or we could do dinner and dancing.”

Bucky tilted his head as though genuinely considering it. “You better pay, though,” he said. “I’m fuckin’ broke.”

Sam laughed. And then — strangely, miraculously — so did Bucky.

Bucky’s laugh was a warm, fragile thing. It was a laugh that would smell like smoke and cedar if it could, and would taste like —

“Jesus,” said Sam. “Never seen you laugh before.”

Bucky stopped laughing, and looked at him from across the living room. Then his gaze seem to turn down, back, inward.

“Well,” he said. “It hasn’t happened in a while.” Then Bucky looked at him, squinting. “You tried philosophy?”

Sam gave him the most unimpressed look he could muster, but it only made the squinty smirk on Bucky’s face worse. Sam rolled his eyes. “I followed a girl in,” he said.

Bucky snorted. “No judgements here,” he said when Sam glared. “I’ve probably done stupider things.”

“I feeling a lot of judgment, actually,” said Sam. “Also — ‘ _probably?_ ’”

“Well — If I could remember. And — I do. A bit,” Bucky said. His expression turned pensive and troubled again before he shrugged as though getting rid of a pest. He breathed in. “I don’t know.” He gave Sam a half-hearted sort of scrunched up smile. “I don’t know.”

 

* * *

 

In the end, Bucky did go back to his room, and Sam made lunch. He put an extra sandwich in the fridge. Just in case. A snatch of memory drifted through his head as he made it — days after his return home, only weeks after Riley’s death, sitting on the couch staring down a sandwich very much like the one he was making now, but unable to eat it, because the numbness that came when he was starving was better than being present in his body, feeling that falling-flying sensation over and over as Riley went down in reams of smoke —

Sam swallowed and made himself finish off his lunch before he did his dishes. He jumped in the shower amidst a vague worry about whether he should be watching when and what Bucky was eating, then shook off the notion. The guy didn’t need another person keeping tabs on him.

His entire body was sore, muscles pushed far past anywhere they’d gone since the Doom debacle. But it was a good sore, the kind you get after a good workout or good sex. He laughed a little to himself as he thought of Bucky’s terrible attempt at a bird joke, the ridiculous handspring that was the flashiest damn thing Sam had ever seen, and then that small, shuddering breath that had escaped Bucky’s lips as they prepared to fight again, and the feel of morning-cold metal on Sam’s skin —

Sam squeezed his eyes shut, and finished washing as quickly as he could because — Nope. This was a bad idea. There were about a billion reasons this was a really bad idea. Bad vibes all around if he went down this _very dark_ and _strangely inviting road_ that should not be gone down by any means because boundaries were boundaries and best friends of best friends who are recovering victims of brainwashing are one-hundred percent out-of-bounds — but there was already a situation that needed his attention. And somehow, in a dark corner of himself, the fact that it was Not A Good Idea and — worse — that Bucky was only a scant few yards away as he stood there only made it more intoxicating, and only easier to imagine it was Bucky’s cool hand instead, and the shaking breaths were not his own…

He banged his elbow attending to that situation, which he decided served him right. But the memory of that breath, of cold metal, didn’t dissipate, even as he dried off and the weirdness of what had just happened hit him. In the moment, it was all well and good to think about somebody, but soon he’d have to see Bucky again, eat with him, talk to him, maybe even spar again. Sam scrunched his face up in the mirror. _That was stupid. How’re you gonna look him in the eye now?_ he thought, to which of course the answer was, _The same way you’ve looked him in the eye since you watched a Disney movie with him and liked that little smile he had on._

He sighed. Same goddamn situation, different day.

 

* * *

 

When he stepped into the living room, there was a Clint on the couch. Which meant there was a Natasha not far away, and, by extension, a Steve.

“How was L.A.?” Sam asked.

“Stupid,” said Clint. “I got a goddamn sunburn, look.” He pulled away the neck of his shirt to show lobster-red skin. “And on my arm, too. Fuckin’ worst.”

“That’s rough, dude,” said Sam. At that moment Natasha walked out of her room towards the bathroom, looking like she hadn’t slept in a week.

“Hey, you,” said Sam.

“Don’t talk to me,” said Natasha and closed the bathroom door.

Sam exchanged looks with Clint. Clint shrugged. “She gets that way,” he said. “You’re lucky if she’s grumpy with you. Means she trusts you.”

“Good to know,” Sam said. “What makes you an expert?”

“Practice,” Clint said darkly. He added, “So how’s life with Robocop?”

Sam frowned a little. “It’s fine,” he said. “How’s life shooting folks in the ass?”

“Hey,” said Clint, “I haven’t done any ass shots in years. And it’s fine…just, you know…” he quirked a smile. “Stupid.”

Sam had the fleeting urge to say _I do not think that word means what you think it means_ in a bad accent, but let it go as Steve arrived hefting groceries and takeout, which occupied Clint and Steve for some time, giving Sam the chance to slip back into his room.

Like he always did when under stress, he began to clean. He sorted through his clothes, finding a few shirts he didn’t wear and a spare pair of running shoes to donate. Then he cleaned his bathroom and sorted through his bookshelf. _The Last Stand_ by Stephen King stayed, but _The Exorcist_ went into the donation pile, because he was never going to open that shit up again unless he wanted nightmares. All of this was a very busy way to keep himself from thinking of Bucky, but it didn’t have the intended effect. Instead, he found himself analyzing everything they’d said to each other since Sam had yelled at him. They’d talked after sparring, they’d talked about Redwing…Bucky had opened up a considerable amount, that was certain. Which meant he trusted him more. Which was good. But also very, very bad if he took the feeling in his stomach every damn time he looked at Bucky into account.

Exactly how taboo was it to be into the ex-assassin best friend of your best friend? On a scale of one to ten, a seven? An eight? The relationship dynamic already made it awkward, with Steve’s myopic view of Bucky’s recovery, and that didn’t even begin to cover the host of issues Bucky must be having. There was almost no way that at this point in his recovery, he’d trust anyone enough to touch him in a way that wasn’t directly combative. The thought made Sam’s heart ache. The poor guy hadn’t been touched in a kind way in…seventy years? Sam wondered briefly if there had been someone, _anyone_ there for him. Had he found anyone who shared in his trauma? Someone he could find some kind of self with? Or had it only been missions, kills, cryofreeze, over and over and over…

Whatever his own feelings were, Sam knew it was out of the question to make any kind of advance. Bucky was in no state for a relationship of any kind — or if he was, it was up to Bucky to decide it. Sam knew keeping quiet about these completely unhelpful feelings was the right thing to do — but that didn’t make it feel any better.

Clint hung around the rest of the day, offering a welcome distraction by showing Steve and Sam pictures of his new dog, pictures of his friend Kate (“she’s like Mini Me!”), pictures of his new dog and his friend Kate together, and various scenes of New York that Steve scrolled through long after Clint and Sam had tired of them. By the end of the evening, Clint was starting to grow on Sam a little more. Despite the odd secretiveness and tendency to hide his feelings behind crassness, he seemed like an alright guy. He clapped Sam on the back when he left, tried to kiss Steve before he was swatted away, and saluted them as he walked down the block.

“Weird guy,” Sam said as he closed the door.

Steve laughed, “Yeah, you should see him drunk.”

“No,” said Sam sternly. “No, I do not want to see that.”

 

* * *

 

That night, Sam dreamt of Riley again.

Riley slid his hand up his thigh, said, _you want to scream into me_

 _no,_ Sam said, _no, i want to kiss you again but not like this, not like this_

 _you want sunlight on a battlefield again_ , Riley said, _you want an easy choice between right and wrong_

 _i do, i do,_ Sam said, but not now, because Riley’s face was half gone, half covered in blood. His intestines were spilling out into Sam’s hands, he could feel blood-slick on his fingers, smell dust and shit and blood from thousands of miles away.

 _don’t you know me, Sam?_ asked half of Riley’s face, _don’t you remember me?_

 _i remember your hands, i remember your rough hands,_ said Sam.

 _you were asleep, and while you slept i fossilized,_ Riley’s face said, _i filled into the mold of you exactly as you were when you went down in flames_

 _but-- i didn’t go down,_ Sam tried to explain, but Riley was unraveling like a rope in his hands. _you died, i didn’t. you’re gone and i’ve filled in your lines, Riley. i’ve hardened your memory into a bone._

 _do you still think of me when you touch yourself?_ said Riley’s teeth, he was just teeth now, cupped in Sam’s hand.

 _no,_ Sam said, and he realized he was crying _._

_do you remember me?_

“Sam.”

_i can’t remember your face._

Riley’s teeth were at his neck now. He could feel them gnawing at skin and sinew.

“Sam.”

 _can’t feel alive with the dead_ , said the teeth.

“Sam!”

Sam jolted upright, the world surging towards him in shades of blue and grey. He only became aware he was making some sort of strangled noise when he stopped making it. He sat frozen, chest heaving for a moment, then looked up. Bucky was standing a few feet away, framed black in the light of the open door.

“Sam,” he said again. “You good?”

Sam swallowed back a surge of bile. He sucked in a sudden deep breath.

“Yeah,” he said, closing his eyes against a wave of nausea. “Yeah. Just…the usual. Stupid shit.”

“Well, I don’t know from psychology,” Bucky said, “But I’d reckon it’s not stupid.”

Sam nodded numbly. He breathed in until he couldn’t feel Riley’s teeth at his neck any more. He blinked, trying to ground himself in reality, taking in Bucky’s backlit figure, the glass of water on the nightstand, the soft glow of light reflected off the satin pillowcase, the streetlamp outside the window. Bucky was wearing his red henley and jeans. Sam glanced at the clock. It was three A.M.

“You haven’t gone to bed yet?” Sam asked.

Bucky didn’t answer. Instead he said, “Hey. Come outside and have a smoke.”

And so Sam found himself sitting on the front stoop with Bucky, shivering in the chill air in his pajamas. He shut his eyes again, the image of Bucky cooly lighting a cigarette burned into his retinas. A really dumb weakness, he thought — guys who looked cool when they smoked. He heard Bucky exhale and smelled tobacco and tar as the wind drifted his way.

“Sorry,” said Bucky unnecessarily.

“I didn’t know you smoked,” Sam said when he opened his eyes.

“Yeah. Looks like seventy years isn’t enough to kick a habit,” Bucky said. “Finally picked these up yesterday.”

“Didn’t call it a habit seventy years ago, though,” Sam pointed out.

“Yeah, but you don’t comb through as any damn newspapers as I do and not see something about nicotine addictions.” Bucky looked at the cigarette mournfully. “This’ll probably be another _sign_ to Steve that I’m remembering things,” he sighed, that edge to his voice again.

“But you are remembering things,” Sam said, sort of hating himself even as he said it. Bucky gave him a sharp look.

“Yeah, I know,” he said after a moment. “I write it down. But it’s not the stuff he wants me to remember.”

Bucky took another long drag of the cigarette, and Sam didn’t ask him to elaborate. He guessed it was the sort of stuff Bucky might not want to remember, either.

“Keep getting snatches of my chanting from my Bar Mitzvah,” Bucky added suddenly. “Just the tune…a couple words.”

Sam turned to look at him fully. “I didn’t know you were Jewish.”

Bucky blew out smoke in a forceful billow. “Yeah, well. They left that part out of the Smithsonian exhibit.”

“Fuckers,” Sam said.

Bucky laughed. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, they are.”

“Okay, then,” Sam said, and he reached over and plucked the cigarette from between Bucky’s lips. Bucky froze, entirely affronted. Sam raised an eyebrow and took a drag, trying to look like he hadn’t only ever taken two hits of a joint in sophomore year of college. Bucky’s consternation turned to blithe amusement as Sam inhaled, choked, and began to cough.

“Fuck me,” Sam wheezed. Bucky snorted a laugh. “Okay, anyways,” he said, “sing me some of your Torah.”

Bucky gave him a look that was the cousin of an eye roll and the sibling of _fuck off._ “No way.”

“C’mon, just the tune.”

“Not happening.”

“Pretty please. I’ll give you back your cigarette.”

“I could take back my cigarette easy, and you know it.”

“Yeah, but you’re not,” Sam said coyly.

The look Bucky gave him this time was the identical twin of _fuck off._ He reached over and smoothly snatched the cigarette from Sam’s fingers. He took a long pull, switching to his thumb and forefinger as he took it from his mouth. He blew out the smoke in a long, opaque stream, and then he began to hum. It began almost tuneless, until Sam picked out a melody, a winding, wandering tune almost like something a parent might sing to a child. Bucky wasn’t a singer, but as he hummed, it became something old and melodic and wondrous.

“Something _Elohim nisa et-Avraham,_ ah da-da-da… _Avraham vayomer hineni…_ ”

He hummed a few more notes, then stopped abruptly. He put out the cigarette under his shoe.

“Don’t remember any more,” he said.

Sam nodded, watching Bucky’s foot twist. “It was nice, though,” he said. “So, uh…what does it mean?”

“Fucked if I know,” Bucky said.

Sam barked out a laugh that was far too loud for a city block at this time of night.

“Sheeit!” Bucky breathed at him, laughing himself as Sam buried his head between his knees, wheezing. “You laughing at me now?”

“Not too difficult to do, man.”

“First you steal my cigarette, then you make fun of me…damn…”

Sam chuckled, then took a deep breath, looking out over the lamplit, quiet street. The air was cold in his throat as he breathed it in.

“Thanks for talking to me,” he said after a moment. “It helps.” He scratched a line down the seam of his flannel pants. “It does.”

“Believe me…I know,” Bucky said quietly. For a moment, they sat like that, still in the cold autumn night. Then Bucky said, “So what’s your next animated recommendation?”

Sam groaned. “You’re killin’ me. Uh…I think we were in the middle of Alice In Wonderland.”

“We finished that.”

“Damn, ok.” Sam pulled out his phone. “Um…looks like Peter Pan, but that one’s racist as shit, so we’re gonna go with Lady and the Tramp.”

Bucky raised his eyebrows. “It’s about dogs,” Sam added. “Dogs eating spaghetti and falling in love. It’s great, trust me.”

“Okay then,” Bucky said. “Dogs eating spaghetti it is.”

As Sam stood and opened the front door, Bucky said, “Hey, where’s that mixtape?”

“Fuckin hell,” Sam muttered. “You want it that bad, I’ll make it now. Watch me.”

“Oh, I will.”

Sam pretended to close the door in his face.

 

* * *

 

The mixtape turned out to be a playlist of about fifty songs, ranging from Sister Rosetta Tharpe to AC/DC to Aretha to Lynyrd Skynyrd to Marvin Gaye to The Jackson 5. Sam compiled it on his laptop while they watched Lady and the Tramp until just after four in the morning. As the movie ended, Bucky clapped, and Sam pulled up his iTunes window.

“You ready to dance?” he asked, as the frenetic piano of Nina’s _Sinnerman_ started.

“Absolutely not,” said Bucky.

“Too bad,” said Sam, “it’s happening. You got me dancing to Nina Simone at four A.M.— remember that name, by the way — and you’re damn well not gonna make me do it alone.”

“No.”

“C’mon. C’mon, get a little of that sexy hip action going —“

“God,” Bucky said, “your dancing is shit.”

“Yeah, I know that, thanks,” said Sam testily. “So you wanna show me how it’s done?”

Bucky looked like he wished the couch could swallow him up. “This is a really long song,” he said.

“I can change it, if that’ll get you on your feet. You like big band jazz?”

“I dunno.”

“Well, you’ll like Duke Ellington. Hold on — here, _Take The “A” Train_. This shit’s classic. Now, come on. Show me how you did it in the forties.”

Bucky’s look shot daggers. “You know exactly how we did it in the forties.”

“Yes, I do,” said Sam happily, “I just want to see you embarrass yourself. Here — “ He changed the song to an obscure AC/DC track he’d thrown in. “Just do some simple swaying. Just foot to foot. You can snap, too. That’s how awkward guys dance nowadays.”

With a pained expression, Bucky stood up. “You calling me awkward?”

“Nah, I’m calling me awkward, and you socially inexperienced. Don’t worry, young padawan. I got you.”

Bucky, it turned out, for all his prowess in a fight and presupposed kinesthetic awareness, was a godawful dancer. He might have been good once, but it was obviously a memory he had yet to access. He bounced awkwardly from one foot to the other, his arms stiff at his side, and his eyes fixed in middle distance as AC/DC played, but all the same, Sam was delighted.

“Look at you! You’re Michael Jackson.”

“I have no idea who that is, but you’re full of shit.”

“Ohhh, we’ll be putting on some of his stuff after this. I’ll teach you to moonwalk.”

Sam did, in fact, teach him to moonwalk. Bucky flat-out refused to learn even the start of the _Thriller_ dance, however, but Sam was satisfied with the level of torture he’d inflicted. Five o’clock found them sitting on the couch, dozing and blasting the _Immigrant Song_ , which was exactly when Natasha came out of her room.

“You have two seconds to turn that off before I grab my new batons and smack you,” she said.

“Yes, ma’am,” Sam said after one look at her disgruntled and bed-headed figure. He turned to Bucky. “Ready for Sleeping Beauty?”

“No,” said Natasha.

“Yes,” said Bucky.

“Hail to the Princess Aurora,” said Sam.

 

* * *

 

Twenty minutes in, (just as Briar Rose was singing to a little bird) Natasha sat down on the coffee table in front of them.

“We need to talk,” she said. “And not here.”

 

* * *

 

Bucky and Natasha would have left right away, but Sam forced them to wait while he put on some jeans and got a coat and hat. He was still freezing once they got outside, but Natasha didn’t walk far. She took them to the park where they’d had coffee and where he and Bucky had sparred. They huddled round her in the middle of the grassy area, Sam with his arms folded tightly against the chill, Bucky with a hard look in his eye.

Natasha scanned the clearing, then turned to them. “We weren’t in L.A.,” she said without preamble. “Steve doesn’t want you to know, but I think you both have a right. We were in Russia…and then Latveria.”

“…Ah,” Sam said, remembering the kitchen table chat he’d had with Natasha and Clint. “But Clint got a sunburn.”

“He already had the sunburn,” Natasha said, rolling her eyes. “He just wanted to pretend he got it fighting bad guys instead of falling asleep at the pool.”

“What’s in Latveria?” said Bucky, eyes fixed on Natasha.

“Victor Von Doom,” Natasha said. “You probably never —“

“I know him,” said Bucky. “Doesn’t like Hydra too much.”

“No.”

“Why weren’t we supposed to know?” Bucky asked.

Natasha gave Sam a look and a nod. He pulled in a deep breath.

“Barton followed a Doombot signature to the old Red Room,” Sam said, turning his head fractionally to see Bucky better. “But nothing had been disturbed. We weren’t sure whether it was actually Doom or someone mimicking the signature to throw us off. The worry was…that the remnants of Hydra were looking to rebuild their tech. For making a soldier.”

Bucky’s face was unreadable. “They’d need technicians who knew the process.”

“Yes, they would,” said Natasha. “But our instincts were right. We cornered Doom and he was very adamant that he didn’t send a Doombot. He doesn’t need more soldiers when he has his suit and his bots. And he definitely would never work with Hydra, ‘cause, you know…Nazis.”

Something tensed in Bucky’s jaw, but he didn’t speak.

“We don’t know if it is Hydra,” said Natasha in a low voice. “It could be any number of organizations. But there’s a chance that they might be looking to take you back,” she said, looking at Bucky. “We have to extremely cautious going forward.”

“I’d like to see them try,” Sam said, but nobody laughed. Both Natasha and Bucky’s faces were stony and impassive. “Okay, fine,” Sam said. “I get why Steve didn’t want Barnes to know, since he’s crazy about protecting him, but why couldn’t I know?”

“Because Steve was afraid you’d tell him,” Natasha said, nodding to Bucky. “You guys talk a lot.”

“No, we don’t,” Sam said at the exact same time Bucky said, “That’s true.”

Sam squinted at Bucky, then turned back. “Okay, fine, we’re BFFs, but, _god_ , somebody’s gotta have a talk with Steve. This is untenable, all this secrecy, trying to protect each other.”

“You know I’m completely the wrong person to be lecturing about secrecy, right?” said Natasha.

Sam glared. “Fine, but someone still needs to talk to Steve.”

“Nose goes,” said Natasha.

“What?”

But Natasha already had her finger on her nose, and impossibly, _infuriatingly_ — so did Bucky.

“What the _fuck,_ ” Sam erupted, “when the _fuck_ did you teach him _nose goes_?”

Natasha just waggled her eyebrows at him.

“Guess the pleasure’s all yours,” said Bucky, clapping him on the back.

“I hate you,” said Sam.

 

* * *

 

Sam didn’t get the chance to talk to Steve until almost two days later, when Natasha announced very loudly that she was going to go to the gym and might even like a sparring partner, to which Bucky replied equally loudly that he’d be glad to go. Sam watched them depart with a glare, feeling annoyed both that they were leaving him, and, deeper down, that it was Natasha sparring with Bucky this time. He’d irrationally hoped to keep that particular thing for himself, like a bauble on a shelf of other things that had made his heart do somersaults.

He managed to corner Steve in the kitchen as Steve was making himself lunch.

“Hey…” Sam said awkwardly. “Can we talk?”

Steve glanced up from spreading mustard on his sandwich. “Sure. What’s up?”

“Uh…we need to talk about Bucky. Um. Barnes.”

Steve’s demeanor remained exactly the same, it seemed, very deliberately. “What about him?” said Steve. He set the knife down slowly.

“I think he needs space,” Sam said.

“He’s got his own room.”

“That’s not what I mean.”

“Okay,” Steve said, “can you elaborate, then?”

“I just think you’re being a little overbearing,” Sam said. He wanted to wince the moment he said it.

Steve raised his eyebrows, but the rest of his face remained immobile. “Overbearing,” he repeated.

“That — no, that’s not what — I think he just feels like you want him to be someone he’s not. Right now.” Sam braced his hands in his pockets. An expressionless Steve was a thousand times worse than an angry-looking one.

“With respect,” Steve said evenly, “I don’t think it’s your problem. That’s between Bucky and me.”

“See that’s the thing, though,” Sam said. “He doesn’t like to be called that, and if you guys actually talked, you’d know that.”

“Are you suggesting I force him to talk to me?”

“Of course not,” Sam said sharply. “I’m just saying he feels the weight of all these expectations whenever he hears that name, and it freaks him out. And I think he needs the relationship to be on his terms right now. No matter how much you miss him.”

Steve seemed to be considering this. But his sharp eyes felt a little too knowing, Sam thought.

Sam forced himself to take a long, even breath. “He’s remembering things,” he said softly. “He remembers his Torah from his Bar Mitzvah. And when I woke him up while you guys were in New York, I told him he was in your house and he said, ‘This isn’t Steve’s room.’ He remembers your house. Remembers you. And I think he wants to love you again — he just needs space to figure out who he is right now.”

He saw Steve take in a measured breath, his shoulders rising imperceptibly. Then he nodded, perhaps a little less expressionless.

“Thank you” he said.

“Don’t thank me,” Sam said. “I got _nose-goes_ -ed into talking to you about it, and I don’t really want to do it again. Barnes needs to talk to you himself after this. I’m not gonna play middle man, and I’m not gonna play family therapist. If you want that, you gotta pay me for my time and effort,” he said. “Barnes is my friend, and I like him a lot. So I’m also telling you this because I saw somebody hurting and I think you could learn a lot from listening to him…And maybe find some healing, too.”

Steve nodded again, eyes on the ground. He looked remarkably calm, as he always did, when there was a storm roiling inside.

“Get him cigarettes and coffee,” said Sam. “That’s my advice.”

Steve looked up. “He’s smoking again?”

“Yeah, and now the house smells like a smoker’s lung.”

Steve chuckled. “Yeah, he quit for a while ‘cause of my asthma.” He crossed his arms, suddenly a thousand miles away. “I was at his Bar Mitzvah.” he said. “Buck’s mom didn’t want me there — she never really trusted me. I never learned much Yiddish, but I do know what _grubber yung_ means.”

“Which is?”

“Ask Bu—uh, Barnes,” Steve said slyly.

“Fine,” laughed Sam. “And don’t forget — coffee and cigarettes.”

“Roger that.”

“Don’t you mean _Rogers_ that?”

“Stop it.”

 

* * *

 

 Natasha and Bucky came back an hour later, as Sam was looking back over his caseload from the VA. His boss had texted the day before to tell him that one of his co-workers had quit, so the rest of them were getting her caseload spread among them. A hazard of the job, but an annoying one — although he supposed he couldn’t complain, because they’d had to take on his cases while he was on leave.

Natasha winked as they came in the door. Sam rolled his eyes and returned to his work. Bucky meandered over to Redwing’s cage and poked his finger through the bars. Sam smelled sweat as he passed, and something sizzling and mechanical. He had the feeling Bucky was about to say something, but a sudden creak from the hall revealed Steve coming out of his room. Steve settled onto the couch next to Sam with his tablet, and moments later Sam heard a door shut down the hall. He realized he’d been rereading the same sentence over and over. Jesus Christ. He set down the file folder on the table and walked to the last door on the right, and knocked.

“Yeah,” came the noncommittal reply.

Sam opened the door cautiously. Down the hall, he could just see Steve become very still as though listening. Sam entered the room and closed the door behind him. It was still the same strange den of tragic and momentous history, still plastered with printouts and newspaper, with Tony Stark’s parents still staring down at them. Bucky was sitting on his bed with a tiny screwdriver, spinning it in an invisible hole in one of the metal seams of his arm.

“You know how it works?” Sam said.

Bucky didn’t reply immediately. He stopped twisting the screwdriver and flipped a panel open in his bicep, and started poking around inside. “Had to,” he said eventually. “If it got damaged on a mission, I had to be able to repair it.”

Something sparked and then whirred, and Bucky made a satisfied grunting noise. He closed the panel and screwed it shut. He flexed his silver hand and spun the arm in a circular motion with a gentle whir of machinery. He smiled up at Sam, and Sam momentarily forgot what he’d come in to say.

“I, uh,” he started, then caught back up to his train of thoughts, “I talked to Steve.”

“Thanks for that,” said Bucky, flexing his hand again.

“Yeah, you owe me,” Sam said. “He seemed to get it, though. Don’t be surprised if you have a coffee date coming up soon.”

“Jesus,” said Bucky.

“I told him to get you cigarettes, too.”

“Well, that’s something.”

The silence stretched a little too long after that. Sam found himself turning awkwardly to read one of the articles on the wall. It was about the bombing of Hiroshima. Bucky came to stand beside him.

“I always meant to ask,” Sam said, startled by the sudden proximity of the sweat and metal smell. “What can you feel with the arm?”

“I can feel warm and cold,” Bucky said quietly, almost with an air of surprise. “Pressure…where it is in space. Just…no pain. I know when something’s wrong because it stops working the way it should. But no pain.”

“Do you want that back?” Sam asked.

Bucky tilted his head. “Dunno. I don’t even notice anymore.” He smiled sadly, and suddenly his face was open in a way Sam had never seen it before. He was like a bruise; bright and painful, and strangely beautiful. Sam felt a familiar twist in his gut.

“Spar again tomorrow?” Sam said.

Bucky smiled wider. “You bet.”


End file.
